As if we didn't have enough going on...

Yesterday, I planned to blog about the wedding. In fact, I started writing a blog that didn't get finished.

Yesterday, I planned to tear through the unpacking process, organizing room after room. I got started on that in the morning, but didn't come close to finishing that either.

Life threw us a curve ball yesterday, as the cliche goes, and it was all we could do to foul it off and get ready for another swing. The short version is this:

While playing, our dog Beaker suddenly went down, with her back legs basically paralyzed. We took her to the doggie version of the emergency room. Best they could figure: problem with the spine. Drugs might help, or she might need really expensive surgery. We brought her home, did our best to make/keep her comfortable, and hoped for the best. She seemed to be showing some small improvement this morning when she managed to defecate, but she didn't urinate all day and by this afternoon she was just dragging both of her hind legs behind her, whereas when we left the doctor's office she could kind of limp around on three. 

Since we still don't have a vet here in PA--none of the ones we contacted will take new patients now--we went back to the emergency place, where they very kindly didn't charge us the automatic $119 fee the second time around. They ended up referring us to a different emergency clinic, on the north side of Pittsburgh. We drove her in there and she'll be staying overnight to have some tests run in the morning, probably on the way to having back surgery. Aside from all the time we spent today trying to comfort her, feed her, giver her water, and get her to pee, we spent 6 hours in the car or in the vet's office for her care.

On the one hand, I feel like a sap for spending so much money on a dog. I mean, it's a pet, not a human being. Yet there's such a closeness between us and our dog that we're going through with it. All the money we received for our wedding is headed into our dog and she'll slurp down more when she's done with that. If it wasn't an option, if we just had to accept that she will be paralyzed or will die, we could accept that. It would be hard, it would hurt, but so it goes. The fact that we can do this for our dog makes it hard not to, especially since we're told that the procedure is 95% effective and that she's a very good candidate for the surgery since she still has a fair bit of feeling in her legs, even though she seems to be going downhill.

This is not, however, the way we anticipated spending either the money from our wedding or the time after it. Still, to see our pup stumbling around without the use of her legs, or--as we did tonight--to not come home to an excited, wagging tail and eager paws reaching up for attention, or not having her cuddle up with me in the evening, all of these things are sadder for me than seeing numbers going down in a bank account when we can do something about it.

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