Tying Up Loose Ends

6 min read

Deviation Actions

BlueBead's avatar
By
BlueBead
Published:
1.1K Views
So... I'm finally going to summarize my last two or so weeks. Beware sad topics like pet death.


In these [two] [journals] I explained the issues my pet African Pygmy hedgehog Hiccup was having and the somewhat unexpected death of my dog Dakota on March 5th. Then, on March 9th, I posted [this picture] that kind of announced that Hiccup had passed away as well.

How things went down with Hiccup were that I took him to the vet Wednesday morning as planned. I had dropped him off in the morning to be anesthetized and x-rayed. When I came in to pick him up around noon the vet showed me some of the x-rays, and even to my untrained eye they looked bad. I knew Hiccup had had an arthritic back for almost two years now, but this time the vet was saying that there was something else going on with his back. Something about little bridges of bone that kind of impede the flexibility of the vertebra or something... I don't know, I wasn't entirely paying attention at that point. The much more concerning area, however, was his jaw. There were areas where the bone had degraded so badly that he pretty much didn't even have a jaw bone in those places. He also had a bone tumor right at the tip of his lower jaw, which is where that swelling was.

Then the vet talked to me about things that could be done to help him. I could have taken him to a more specialized animal hospital that can do chemo therapy stuff, but like what my dog's vet had said just a few days prior, that only buys him a few more painful months of life. The other option was to try a sort of "heavy duty" painkiller that isn't even guaranteed to work well on him. (It sounded pretty experimental to me.) However, my Mom and I talked it over, and our biggest concern was that Hiccup was just not going to be able to eat with those considerable portions of his jaw missing, and that he was going to end up starving to death or having to be force-fed with a syringe. Both of those plans were considerably below the figurative line in the sand I had drawn in terms of Hiccup's quality of life. Hiccup's biggest joys in life were food, running in his wheel, and sleeping, but with his ailments he couldn't enjoy any of those. We decided it would be best to have him euthanized... I got to see him awake one last time to say goodbye, and then I had to leave him because the euthanasia process is a little more difficult in small animals than in cats and dogs, so it's not exactly ideal for me to watch.

My Mom and I came back a while later to pick up Hiccup's body to bring him home. On March 12th, we buried him in our backyard. I found a spot where we had this lone little pine tree at the edge of the forest behind our house, and I figured a prickly tree for a prickly hedgehog was a nice place for him to be. It's also a quiet and shaded place, so I think Hiccup would have liked it. I buried him with his handling fleece, since he always really loved his fleece.

This just seems to be the Year of Cancer for my family. First, my Grandfather got diagnosed with Leukemia either really late last year or really early this year, but thankfully he's been doing pretty well on chemo. Then my dog Dakota had to be euthanized for a large tumor next to his liver, and then my hedgehog Hiccup was euthanized for a bone tumor in his jaw... Crummy year. Not quite as bad as 2014 for me yet, but still a really shitty draw.

Overall, I've been doing okay. I've gone from an "active" sad that involved a lot of crying and thinking about all this crummy stuff to more of a "passive" sad where I'm just kind of deadened and unmotivated... I've been trying to get back to eating better to continue my weight loss trend, but my parents have been making that really fucking difficult. Our dishwasher broke, so their solution to not have to do loads of dishes by hand is to eat out at restaurants or get take-out like every single night. The only way I could still stay within my diet plan under these circumstances is to fast all day and be freaking starving by time dinner rolls around, or to just eat the healthiest stuff on the menu, which for most restaurants would probably still require me to do a lot of fasting earlier in the day. I don't have the will power for either of those plans at the moment, since I'm still struggling with slowly training myself out of binge eating in light of the recent string of tragedies. My parents are going out to dinner again tonight, but I'm refusing to go at this point. I've gained like 2-3 pounds in this past week alone, despite working out 50% longer than I usually would every day to try to compensate. It's kind of shitty that I'm skipping out on my Mom's birthday dinner, but I've been warning them about all this food stuff for like the past 3 days, so it shouldn't come as a surprise.

So now I'm just... either emotionally dead inside or perpetually grumpy, but I still think I'm doing better overall than I would have two or more years ago. I've been making some major improvements in terms of mood, coping skills, and self-confidence this year. However, this whole scenario is one I think anyone would struggle with. I still feel kind of screwed over more than my other family members though, since Hiccup was kind of only my pet. (He was really shy and only tolerated me.) While everyone else in my family lost a beloved dog and that's shitty enough, I lost a beloved dog AND a beloved hedgehog not even a week apart. So now I'm pretty much just bitter. Sad, numb, disgruntled, and bitter, but coping and not wanting to hurt myself, so I'd say that's a win in the whole scheme of things.

Just... blegh. TL;DR: Blegh.
© 2016 - 2024 BlueBead
Comments0
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In