11/12/2024
In the early hours of the 11th December 9years ago, I said goodbye to my first soul dog; Penny. 🤍 She was more than a dog, I loved her like a child. Anyone who got to know Penny, knew she was an old soul, so kind, gentle and very intelligent. She was the one who taught Mila how to be the goodest girl.
I’ll never forget the day I adopted Penny. An entire litter of 10 puppies had dug a hole into our backyard and were running a muck. Expect Penny, she came up to 15year old me and sat at my feet. It was love at first sight.
Being the runt of the litter she faced many health challenges, she was even diagnosed with a rare aggressive cancer at age 5! But despite having 8 weeks to live, we were so lucky to have another 2.5years together.
Thinking she would eventually pass from her cancer, the last thing I suspected was her lungs to give up. She had an acute respiratory distress episode. (Similarly to COVID patients that went down hill fast and needed to go onto a machine to breathe for them). The last photo was the day before she passed. Happy as Larry.
The morning of the 10th was like any other day, she had breakfast and I went to uni. She was having a sleepier day than usual and went back to bed. By lunch time my housemate called me to come home from uni because Penny seemed wobbly/drunk. By the time I got home she didn’t have enough energy to walk - I got her straight into the car and even needed to support her walking into the vet clinic.
Her lungs were bad…it was like that were sticky and couldn’t expand properly. Oxygen wasn’t enough…An incredible vet nurse from a different team could see that Penny was deteriorating too fast and insisted she needed to be ventilated (breathed for). She was right.
Before you knew it, Penny was in an induced coma and on life support.
All of the vets in the specialist clinic reviewed her X-rays and even asked for some lecturers from the uni to come in for their opinions. The nurses changed their roster to be able to care for Penny overnight and some even started in the early hours of the morning to offer more support. Despite having the most incredible team and doing everything we could… we could not save her. I could not save her. By 2am her kidneys gave up and I had no choice but to make the call.
It all happened so fast. It was like someone had turned my world upside down. Penny was my rock, my consistent, my family. She had been through thick and thin with me and still chose to love me. That kind of unconditional love is so hard to come by. There is nothing like the unconditional love of a dog….
Saying goodbye to Penny so fast and without a warning was life changing. Through the heartache, Penny has helped shape me into the clinician I am today. I understand how much your pets mean to you, how it feels to lose them, and each pet I see, I care for them as if they were my own. Having no warning signs, Losing Penny further attuned my attention to detail. I became more and more thorough, not wanting to miss any subtle signs in my patients. If I can, I don’t want you to have to experience the kind of shock and urgency of saying goodbye like I did.
I didn’t have an option to plan a goodbye for Penny. We had to help her there and then, and many of us have had to say goodbye like this as well. Emergencies happen. But through the years working in emergency clinics, Ive learnt how we can 1) avoid emergency goodbyes in our older pets that are near the end, 2) how to make emergency goodbyes as peaceful as possible in clinic, and 3) how to honour and commemorate them after their goodbye.
By helping each pet and their family during the most difficult times, this helps me honour beautiful Penny.
✨ GENTLE HOME GOODBYES ✨
