Hi....my name is Denise and I've recently lost (5 weeks yesterday) one of my dogs. (I own 4 others). His name was Isaac, he was a German Shorthaired Pointer. He was 12 years 2 months old. We had to make the gut wrenching decision to put him down because he had bladder cancer AND a cancerous tumor around his pancreas. We had a tumor removed from his bladder once already, only 3 1/2 weeks prior, that was preventing him from urinating. There were no other tumors detected at the time of surgery. He had barely recovered from that, when they did 2 cat scans, 8 days apart, to try and see why he wouldn't eat. That's when they discovered the tumor around the pancreas and several more tumors had already regrown in his bladder. There wasn't anything they could do, no operations...no chemo's....nothing. He was already on pain meds and they said it was an extremely fast and aggressive cancer, they even thought it was 2 different types of it...which they said was rare. And they said he wouldn't go very long...so...he's gone. And I'm having ALOT of trouble with his absence and guilt of having it done...I keep thinking, "what if I'd waited a little longer..." I cry alot...mostly at night and bed time, but not always. Sometimes it's on the way home from work...I am 54 years old and have had many, many animals. Some, I've raised and bred myself. So, the point being I have also lost many pets...including several horses. Why I can't get ahold of this one, and just straighten out, I don't know. I even looked into counseling, but my insurance will not cover it, and at $150 an hour, I can not afford to pay out of pocket for it. My other dogs mean the world to me too, one, my rescue dog, is 11 and has skin cancer, and he's had 2 operations over 15 months to remove tumors from his skin, so far he's done very well with the spots being removed, yes, they reoccur, but they so far are staying on his skin and not going internal. and my other 3 are pugs...all related...grammy dog is "Petey" age 12+, who I adopted when her owner, my best friend, died suddenly and unexpectedly at age 43 from an anurism and stroke, "Pippin", age 7 1/2...who is petey's daughter and "Ben" age 5, who is Pippin's son. So, there it is in a nutshell. I give Isaac (his ashes) a hug and a kiss every night before bed, and tell him I'm so sorry we couldn't stop the horrible disease he had. It happened so fast, 3 1/2 weeks all told, and I'm having such a hard time dealing with him being gone. He used to "sing" at me, and was such a wonderfully kind and bouncey dog...I want him to come back so bad...he didn't deserve what he had...
