Goodbye to my pal Cinnie

I've been AWOL this weekend. Thanks to a pre-written post, I had something post on Friday.

Friday was a very bad day, though.

It started on Thursday morning, really. As I was getting ready for work, our dog -- which my wife had rescued about 3 years before we met -- had gotten up and peed everywhere all over the living room. That she peed inside isn't always surprising -- she did that sometimes when we didn't get her outside quickly enough. But, the amount was very high and unusual.

Then, during the day, she vomited a lot. Literally every time she drank water or ate food, it came back up.

Let me add some context here. Two years ago, Cinnie -- short for Cinnamon Toast -- beat cancer. In the time I got to know her, Cinnie went from being a scared dog who was afraid of most people to being a friendly dog who loved children and neighbors.

For the past three or four months, though, Cinnie had been struggling. She had some stomach ulcers, and she had some issues where she wasn't digesting her food properly (called motility). This caused nausea problems for her, and it led to her losing weight.

She had problems breathing. Well, she's always had problems breathing because she was rescued after she pulled herself free from a tree where she had been tied and bred for red tick coon hound puppies probably 4 to 8 times in 4 to 5 years. That caused her trachea to have issues, since she probably crushed it to escape.  But her breathing problems had worsened. She started sneezing a lot and even had one weekend where she sneezed up some blood. Her kidneys were in stage 1 kidney failure.

All this added up to cause her to lose a lot of weight. At her heaviest, she was 45 pounds. At her last vet visit two weeks ago, she was 27 pounds.

So, when she could not keep any food down at all, it was very problematic. We think she may have had a cancerous tumor in her nasal passages causing problems there too. Our last ditch effort was a steroid shot two weeks ago.

In the end, though, she was suffering a lot. She couldn't keep any food or water down. She was lethargic. She wasn't herself. She was in pain.

We came to the decision that keeping her with us longer was only because we wanted her around and not because her quality of life was any good. So, we said goodbye to our Cinnie girl on Friday.

It still hurts a lot. I've immersed myself in sorting through baseball cards, watching college football, drinking too much liquor one night, and otherwise trying to avoid the fact that when I get home from work tomorrow, she won't be there.

My wife is struggling a lot with this. Cinnie was her first dog, and Cinnie was very much her dog. Cinnie followed my wife around the house when my wife would be cleaning, cooking, talking on the telephone, or even sleeping.

The house is a lot quieter now without our puppy around. We're not sure right now whether we will get another dog. We might or we might not, but it's just too soon for us to think about that.

To celebrate her life, here are some photos I took of Cinnie during the 5 years that I knew her.

Every Easter, Cinnie went on a pepperoni hunt rather than an Easter egg hunt. This is from the 2014 version. 

This is the photo I took of her back in 2010 that we have framed on top of our TV.

When my wife and I went out to football games in Athens and stayed overnight to have fun with family and friends, we would board Cinnie. I picked her up in my car and put the top down. She's smiling away here, knowing full well that she was at that point the coolest dog on the face of the planet.

Cinnie's favorite blanket was her Green Bay Packers blanket that she got from me.

Cinnie loved sitting on her orange blanket next to her mommy on the couch.

Cinnie has her lanyard around her neck here, ready to go to a Georgia football game with us.

Cinnie had a very difficult life before my wife rescued her. After her rescue, she was treated like royalty, and she deserved every bit of the treatment she received.

I miss her greatly, and I know I will miss her for a long time.

Like I said, it's been a rough weekend.