"It's just a dog"

Doug — Sat, 01 Nov 2003 16:33:00 -0600

Well, here’s our emotional event of the week. Actually it started about five or six weeks ago. Our family dog, Princess, hurt her hip. I won’t go into all the details. Suffice it to say that we’re quite attached to the dog. After much deliberation we decided to have a fairly expensive surgery to correct her hip. The surgery was yesterday and went very well. The doctor says she should be back to normal in about six weeks. Even today she’s getting around nearly as well as she was before the surgery.

I asked a bunch of people for advice on what to do. No one came out and advised us to cough up the money and do the surgery. I appreciate their advice even though I didn’t really follow any of it. At the end of the day I’m the one who has to look at our hurting dog and say, “You have to keep hurting because I won’t pay the money to make it stop.” I couldn’t do that. One of my coworkers from Cleveland recently had their cat put down because they learned it had diabetes. They didn’t want to deal with that. I’m not judging him for his decision. I just didn’t have the emotional strength to put our dog down. I’m too attached to her. I just couldn’t deal (right now) with loosing her.

I hope those of you who advised me don’t feel like I’m disrespecting you because I didn’t follow your advice. I do value you and your opinions. That’s why I asked for them. I also hope you don’t think less of me because I made a choice you didn’t think was wise. I guess that’s my biggest fear: that the people I value are going to disapprove of me and my decision.

Anyway, that means Christmas will be pretty thin this year. Carla’s been working very hard selling Tastefully Simple. She had been building up a nest-egg of cash for Christmas. That money (along with some money from consulting jobs I have lined up) will now pay for the surgery. Anything Carla makes from her business now we’ll be able to use for Christmas and birthdays that are coming up. I honestly don’t think our kids are going to “suffer”. We’ll be able to have fun together and with other family. They already have lots of toys. Grandma was just telling me she has a hard time knowing what to buy them.

The moral of the story is that I don’t think pet insurance is that unreasonable. Maybe better than that is to just set aside $75/month per pet in savings. Ha! If we were good at “savings” this wouldn’t have been an emotional decision.

Update: The blue bandage in the picture is where her IV was. Her back hip is shaved nearly to the skin. You can’t see it, but her leg is also shaved (except her foot). The incision has five stitches in about two inches. I guess we’ll have to see the plastic surgeon if it scars badly I’ve written a full chronicle of the PuppySurgery.

@Lathi.net: "It's just a dog"

"It's just a dog"