Stella

As I mentioned last week, our dog, Stella, was ill.    She was suffering from some sort of neurological disorder and was progressively getting worse.  She was requiring 24/7 care, needing to be given water and let out so frequently that attempting to sleep was futile.  I arrived at the point where I was fearing that my husband or I would fall asleep while driving, because we were so groggy from going out with her into the  backyard in our pj's at 2 AM and then again at 2:30 AM and then again at 3:15 AM, and it continued that way all through the night.  She stopped eating.  She looked right through us, not really at us.  We became sources of water, not her people.  If we fell asleep and she didn't get the water her mind demanded, she would enter a frenzied state that she seemed unable to get herself out of.  She would race from one end of the house to the other barking and whining, back and forth, for up to 17 hours.  After three weeks of this, and many, many medical tests that told us only that she didn't have any of the diseases known to cause some of her symptoms, we decided that it was time.  The intervals between her needed drinks were getting shorter and shorter, we could no longer cope. Further tests seemed only to have the purpose of telling us what was going to kill her rather than provide a treatment, so we decided that it was time. At the end of the week we made the difficult decision to put her down.  We really miss her and routinely look for her at certain moments of the day, and tear up,

because she isn't and won't ever be there again.