12/03/2025
This Giving Tuesday, please consider donating to Sanctuary Rescue as they truly do the Lord's work saving all these sweet little potatoes. ❤️ I adore volunteering and working with this organization. They know their stuff and do so much good for our four legged friends in need. 💕
Our love for potatoes is pretty well known by just about everyone, including area shelters. If any crusty, dusty bulldog or bulldog mix shows up at one of our partner shelters we are getting a call almost immediately. Potatoes are not exactly known for being the picture of health, so most of those calls include a little disclosure about a skin infection, an ear infection, cherry eye or entropian requiring surgery, an infected tail pocket, allergies, and on and on. Much to our medical team’s dismay, that doesn’t really deter us from saying, Oh my, that poor little pookie bear potato, SEND THEM!! Sweet baby angel Jelly Roll here was no different. She was especially messy: entropian so bad that one of her eyes had permanently ulcerated, ear infections in both ears, lumps and bumps and itchies, and the biggest, baddest, ugliest “tumor” hanging off of her left side that we had ever seen. This thing was the size of a small orange and just oozed and was absolutely gag-worthy. Our hearts exploded every time we looked at her. We treated the ear infections, tried really hard to treat the mammoth mass on her side but it refused to heal, started medicated baths and applying drops and ointments in her eyes multiple times a day. She arrived coughing and hacking to the point of regurgitating. It took us a couple of months to get her as fixed up as we could so that she was surgery ready, but eventually we got her there. She went in and got spayed, got her eyes done, and got the large monster removed. This ugly beast of a lump/bump/mass/tumor was sent off for testing. We were sure it was cancer and our wonderful Jelly Roll would be a hospice case but then the results came back and it was just a ruptured cyst. Great news. Jelly Roll was looking and feeling much better and she went up for adoption.
We were thrilled when she found her perfect home and loved the updates and pictures of her glued to her new dad’s side. Then last week we got an email. After a month of loving her and saying how friendly and perfect she is they also said she was just too old. We tried to explain that she was a stray dog that ended up in a shelter and no one really knew how old she was; we were all just guessing, that there was a good chance that she was much younger than she looked but just had the misfortune of living a really hard life before making her way to us. But they insisted they weren’t ready for the responsibility of a senior dog. So our sweet baby angel Jelly Roll is back. And although we were very happy to see her, she wasn’t quite as happy to see us. She stuck right to her new/old dad’s side until he left the building and then she sat at the glass door whimpering and whining and looking for him. It was absolutely heartbreaking. Jelly Roll didn’t eat for the next three days. That was a week ago, and luckily she’s a fat lard and her appetite is slowly reappearing.
So this post is two-fold - one is to say come to the store one day and meet Jelly Roll and maybe give her a second chance at a happily-ever-after. Us old gals need love, too. And two, to demonstrate that we always go above and beyond to help our crackly old taters get out of the shelter and get the medical care and treatment they need to be happy, healthy tubulars.
Our very last match offer come from a few friendly businesses that all love and adore fat lard potatoes. 89paintrva, Peace of Mind Pets RVA, Max Appraisals (no social media, but if you need a property appraised please look them up and give them a call), and trishasdreamvacations have all pitched in to offer our very last matching donation of Giving Tuesday 2025. Together they will match all donations between now and midnight up to $1,750. You know the drill - they are all great companies, but we’d really like to take all of their money so we can keep helping sad spuds!
Check the comments for ways to donate and an “after” picture of our sweet baby angel Jelly Roll.
