I’ve put off writing this as long as I can, but it’s with an impossibly heavy heart that I have to report that our darling Little Bear passed away on 22 June. It was his fifteenth birthday.
We were meant to be celebrating. He was meant to be tucking into his birthday cake while wearing, just long enough for me to snap a picture, the obligatory, home made birthday hat. Other Half was meant to be rolling his eyes at me as I made him sing to the birthday Bear. Instead, we were saying our goodbyes.
We are beyond heartbroken. We lost Annie 11 months and two weeks before Bear, and now the house is without a furry heartbeat for the first time in sixteen years.
Rapid decline
There is some comfort in the fact that he was unwell for a very short period. Mid-afternoon the day before his birthday he started to tremble. I took him straight to our vet, who suspected a slipped disc. Doped up for the pain, we booked an appointment the next morning for a follow-up. The plan changed though when, as the meds wore off, he became increasingly restless. At one am we headed off to the out of hours vets and he was admitted. They referred him to a specialist and we collected him first thing for the trip to High Wycombe.
After ruling out a disc issue, their concern was that he’d had a neurological event as the emergency vet had spotted some unusual eye flickering during the night. They sent us home while they prepared him for an MRI scan, wanting first to do an ultrasound to rule out any other causes.
Unwilling to go too far away, Stu and I wandered around nearby Marlow. We had lunch while obsessively checking our phones for an update or missed call. Running out of nerves, I called them at lunchtime and the vet called me straight back. They asked for permission to proceed to the MRI as they were just finishing up the ultrasound and had found nothing untoward. We said yes, and they suggested we go home and wait for an update.
Nine minutes later, the vet called back, full of apologies. As they were finishing the scan, they changed the angle and discovered a golf-ball sized tumour on Bear’s liver. There was nothing they could do. Our boy was deteriorating too quickly.
We talked about bringing him home and asking our vet to visit, as we did for Annie and Vizzy, but decided that would be unfair. When we got to the vets, they brought him to us, wrapped in a blanket. He was barely conscious, and I was glad of that. Glad that whatever they had given him for the pain was working as it should. That he was, I prayed not fully aware of what was going on.
Stu grabbed ‘Littler’ from the car, a soft toy Miniature Schnauzer I bought years ago in a car boot sale for 50p. Bear loved it, and for reasons I can’t remember, it had been in the car for weeks. Even doped up, he immediately rested his chin on his teddy and then he slipped quietly away. My Little Bear. My Daemon Dog. My little soul mate was gone.
Legacy
I’ll write more when I’m able to. For now I’m just incredibly sad that he is no longer in the world. He taught me so much and if, by sharing our journey these past twelve years we’ve helped just one other reactive dog, then Bear’s legacy will live on.
Thank you for following our story. Hold your fur babies close. x
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