Somewhere in the neighborhood, an ice cream truck is playing "When the Saints go Marching In". I'm in the kitchen, making her favorite meal: pizza, and my eyes are burning. Pizza crusts are the only table scraps she gets. But Adi isn't here. Actually she's in that box over there. But tonight she's not going to climb under the sheets when I get into bed, lay up against my back, then crawl out 15 minutes later and lay by my feet trapping them to the edge of the bed. She's not going to trap all the blankets and freeze us out tonight.
That's her in my profile picture.
We weren't really Pug people. We usually had larger dogs. My daughter wanted something smaller when she moved back to Minneapolis. She and my wife 'saved' (cost us about $250) Indy from a Missouri puppy mill. A year later she decided she couldn't keep a dog, a job, an apartment and go to school. So we ended up with Indy. A year or so later, she decided to try it again. This time we enriched a Iowa puppy mill. The owner's veiled threats that the runt of the litter was too small to sell and would soon be put down sealed the deal. She ended up with both Adi and Elsi (the runt). My daughter made arrangements with a local clinic to have both of the girls spayed at a cost a student could afford. Adi's went OK, but Elsi started hemorrhaging and nearly bled to death. Adi and my daughter spent the night on the floor at the vet's next to Elsi's cage till she pulled thru.
There was a fire In my daughter's apartment building while she was at school. The firemen evacuating the building heard the puppies wailing, entered the apartment and 'rescued' them. After the fire was put out (BBQ on a patio) an Eden Prairie Firefighter stayed at the apartment manager's office protecting the puppies til my daughter claimed them.
The girls moved east to Ohio with my daughter and then moved west to Washington after we moved out here. We all settled into the same house, yes it's a bit tight. When my daughter was pregnant with our second grandson, Elsi started getting aggressive towards the first grandson, knocking him over whenever she got the chance. I don't think Elsi ever fully recovered from her near death experience. We placed Elsi with Pug Rescue and Adi moved in with us.
Indy and Adi
Adi ate everything in sight. I saw her catch and eat a spider. I know she ate the gravel in an abandoned aquarium. She should have weighed 18 lbs but we couldn't get her below 30 lbs. We called her our sausage.
She's had allergy problems, ear infections that last for months (treat bacterial infection, then treat the resulting yeast infection, back to bacterial) and the doctor suspected an enlarged heart. A few months ago she had a severe cough but it was gone. She did blow chunks of gunk out of her nose every time she went out to potty, but we were giving her Claratin. She was wheezing this morning but I thought it was part of the allergies. Didn't seem like a big thing.
She passed peacefully sometime this afternoon while we were at work. I'd like to think it was while I was sharing a rainbow with BJM. We'll bury her and the ashes of another dog that passed 8 years ago on the sunny side of the house tomorrow.