SAD NEWS . . .

The night before we left for Vegas in October Sadie developed a lump on her left leg right at the top where her shoulder socket is. We took her to the emergency clinic and they gave us some shots, xrays, slides, etc. The lump has progressively gotten bigger so I took her to our vet on Monday. It's a VERY aggresive form of cancer and our vet has given her 4-6 months from when it was diagnosed. That would be October :( There is nothing that we can do for her now except make her comfortable. If the tumor continues to grow as it has in the last month, it will be orange size by the end of January and grapefruit by February. We will then have to decide when to put her down.

The hardest part of all of this was telling the kids. Initially we thought that we would wait and tell the kids after Christmas, but Sadie came home with a bandage from the vet because we couldn't get the tumor to stop bleeding where he poked it to make a slide out of the cells. We decided to just tell them. I told the kids that we needed to talk about Sadie and the first thing out of Grace's mouth was, "Is she going to die?" That was very hard to say yes. We were trying to give them a time frame so we told them that by the time we went on our cruise for Spring Break, Sadie probably wouldn't be with us anymore. Caden then said, "We don't have to go on the cruise, we can just stay home with Sadie." I bawled. It was very sweet. He then told Grandma Mem on Tuesday that she would be watching Sadie while we went on the cruise. He doesn't really understand it all, but he knows that he's trying to make sure that she is taken care of.

As much as I moan and groan about our dogs, they are family. We've had Sadie for ten years and it is going to be very hard to let go :)