It
was late at night around eleven when my husband, Tom,
took our three dogs, Snoopy, Li’l Bit and Sugar,
out for a final evening walk in our front yard. We don’t
have a fence around the front, but our Maltese have
been trained to stay in the yard, to ‘do their
business’.
Tom
didn’t notice the man that was walking his 2 very
large German Shepherds, going by on the street. Our
dogs are very friendly and usually run to greet anyone
who comes up, happily barking. Sugar and Li’l
Bit are younger and beat Snoopy to the road. The 2 German
Shepherds immediately started pulling away from their
owner & ran towards our two younger dogs. Snoopy
must have sensed something was wrong because he ran
out into the road to jump between the German Shepherds
and Sugar and Li’l Bit. The large dogs were all
over him, chewing on him. My husband jumped between
them and Snoopy, grabbing Snoopy up & running to
put him in the flatbed of the truck, so he could find
the Sugar and Li’l Bit. They had run back to the
front door. The owner of the other dogs had regained
control of their leashes and was gone!
Li’l
Bit and Sugar had gone back to the front door, so Tom
brought Snoopy inside the house to wake me up. Snoopy
was in shock, so I told him to toss some towels in the
dryer and bring me one to wrap him in, while I checked
his wounds. After examining him more closely I decided
that he needed stitches. We retrieved the warm towels
from the dryer and took him on in. There were no internal
injuries and he did quite well after the stitches were
removed.
Several
months later, we noticed that he appeared to be in pain,
so I took him to the Doctor. After some testing, it
was determined that he had Corticosteroid Meningitis,
and was experiencing the headaches that went along with
it. They put him on Prednisone and Valium to help keep
him out of pain. He remained on these two drugs for
the remainder of his life.
He
continued to go downhill, so we decided to schedule
a time that we could go have him ‘put down’.
It was such a sad time in our life. I still cannot believe
that he’s actually gone. It’s been 2 years
we miss him terribly and our lives will never be the
same.
|