My Yogi Baby

Well...

We had to put our shop lioness to sleep yesterday.

She's been having a lot of hip problems the past few months and about a month and a half ago kept acting lethargic and not really acting like herself.  We had our vet come to the shop and he wanted to do bloodwork and run some tests.  Turns out she had horrible arthritis which was causing her back legs so much pain she didn't want to stand on them.  Then when her bloodwork came back, it showed heartworms.

So he had her on some muscle relaxers for her hips and a strong medication to try to kill out some of the heartworms that hadn't completely formed yet and told us to watch her for a few weeks, then he'd come back and re-do the blood work and we'd start her on 2 rounds of arsenic to try to kill out the other forming heartworms.  He warned us though that the mature heartworms, we couldn't really do anything about and they would eventually kill her.

She did pretty good for a few weeks after that, especially with her muscle relaxers.  She even had days of being a "puppy."  Then all this week it went downhill.  We had her appointment scheduled for yesterday afternoon to recheck her.  But this week she had no energy and wouldn't even bend her back legs when she walked and hardly put any weight on her right hind leg.  Dad and me talked about not wanting her to suffer the next few months, especially with the arsenic. 

Luckily I wasn't here yesterday afternoon when the vet came.  He told them that he would take her for the arsenic treatments because they are really hard on them (ya think? it's POISON!) and in order for her hips to feel any better that they would have to do surgery and work on them, but since her arthritis was so bad, it would be a temporary fix.  In the end, my brother Terry made the decision.  The nurse for the vet cried and cried (she's so sweet, when we had a little kitten show up at the shop with a broken leg and magled ear, she adopted her and still sends me pictures of "Charlotte").

So needless to say it was a really crappy situation.  And today is especially sucky because she always greeted me at my car, I would say "hello, my Yogi baby" and we'd come up to my office for the day.

With her summer lion haircut and her pretty bows

We dressed her up one day! I don't think she liked it!

 Keep us all in your prayers, we've had Yogi a long time and it's gonna be a rough adjustment for us all.