This past Saturday, I had to make the horrible decision to end the life of my best friend. Saturday morning she couldn't walk or stand up, she looked at me like "why don't my legs work?" I was crying; she didn't understand. My beautiful puppy was so sad and in pain.
Molly had cancer, lymphoma actually, and had been undergoing chemotherapy for about 8 months. Unfortunately, this is a cancer you can't cure, you can only hope for remission. Nonetheless, we went ahead with treatment, excited at the prospect of more than just the couple of weeks her prognosis gave us without treatment.
See below for more details....
Molly and I met 5 years ago at the Humane Society in Guelph, Ontario. Her father and I were there to look at a different dog we had seen on the internet. The dog we came to see was cute but enormous, not suitable for us or our home. Molly was right next to him poking her nose through the bars of her stall. She howled at us and we decided to take her for a short walk. She was the most gorgeous dog we had ever seen... such a beautiful face and boundless energy. I filled out the forms that day and Molly was ours a few days later.
Our life together needed some adjustments at first. I had a meeting to go to the day I brought her home. So I left her in the house, with a bone and left the window open (screen closed) so she could smell outside. I was gone for 1.5 hours and when I came back, my neighbour told me a dog had busted through the screen in my front window and ran down the street. I was so upset, I had just got her... so I called the Humane Society and the minute I told them "She's a husky with..." I heard "Yeah, she's here..." She had ran down the street and right up to the first person she had seen and he called the Humane Society right away and she was picked up. All in the 1.5 hours that I had been away. This story tells you a lot about Molly; my god how she loved people. Any people, all people, all the time. Anyone walking down the street would get a howl and a wag of the entire back half. Some people were a little scared because she looks a little wolfish, but she would always win them over - she just wanted to make friends.
Speaking of friends, she had more friends than I did... people would come visit just to see my dog, she had the most magnetic personality. She would turn "non-dog people" into "Molly-people." She had a best friend named Sampson, a Golden Retriever we lived with for a year... they would wrestle then fall asleep together on the couch... they were the best of friends...
She loved being outside, smelling the smells, watching people walking by... she loved being inside if there were people over, so she could entertain and be loved.
Over the years, things changed, we moved, her father and I broke up, we moved again and she was the one constant in my life for 5 years. Then she got sick last year. She stopped eating for several days and then a lump appeared in her lower abdomen. I took her to the vet and they said they were pretty sure it was lymphoma. I was DEVASTATED. She was only 5.5 years old, she was the best dog I'd ever known.
We were told she would only have weeks to live if we didn't treat her, but that the treatment would cost more than $3000. I had just lost my job and that was all my savings, but there was no question that I would not let my dog die without a fight. Luckily we lived in Guelph which has the best Veterinary College in the country, so we began chemotherapy at the Ontario Veterinary College in September of last year. We started a well established chemo protocol called the Madison-Wisconsin protocol and Molly responded almost immediately - there were some bumps in the road, an occasional bout of diarrhea or vomiting, but overall, she was back to her normal self. There's no way anyone would ever know she was sick - she was back to jumping all over people and running and playing. She was so excited to go to the Vet every week where she would get her chemo - it was 'all-about-molly-time'... how could she not be excited?
We had many good months until her relapse this spring. In March she stopped eating again, and started having pain in her neck (this was a new symptom that hadn't existed before). The doctors said the cancer had spread to her spinal cord and was causing nervous symptoms like pain and ataxia. We started her on a new drug (more expensive) that was able to cross the blood-brain barrier and work on the cancer in the spine. Again Molly responded immediately. Within a day her pain was gone and she was back to behaving as normal. I was so happy she was back to normal, it was such a roller coaster of terror that she wasn't going to make it, back to a totally normal dog.
Alas, the treatment was not to last and Molly's symptoms began to return before we could go back for treatment (she needed at least two weeks between treatments and she was getting about 9 or 10 days before the symptoms retunred). Until this Saturday, May 17, suddenly, she couldn't stand up... couldn't walk. I was devastated. I laid on the floor with her for an hour while I waited for the vet to return my call. They told me I needed to come in immediately and told me we were essentially out of options. They could hospitalize her, give her steroids, and wait until they could transfer her to the Veterinary college for more treatment, but it was unlikely anything was going to help at this point.
It was time to make the decision that I knew was coming but was so unprepared for. Molly died at 1pm on Saturday May 17, laying in my arms.
I'm at such a loss... I don't know what to do with myself, she was my family, my favourite person. I miss her like I would miss the air, I feel like my heart has been ripped out. I keep thinking she's going to be there, or I have to give her her pills or let her out, but she's not there. I was just so lucky to have her.
Anyway, thanks for reading about my dog.