Goodbye, Kai
posted in Illnesses, Livestock and Pets |
In 1998, OmegaDad and I purchased our first house, in Hippy Dippy Enclave In The Woods, near Small Mountain University Town. Our house had a fenced yard, and we said to each other, “Hey! We’ve got a fenced yard now! Now we can get ourselves a dog!”
Somewhere around Mother’s Day the next year, we were at PetSmart near GrannyJ’s house, and they were having an “adoption event”. So we oohed and ahhed over the kitties, and poked our heads in at the dogs. There was a puppy there, about six months old, who looked just plain kinda goofy. He was cute. His head tilted in that way puppies’ heads do. We kept looking at him, and talking to each other, and looking at him…
And the next thing we knew, we had a dawg.
We named him Kayenta, Kai for short, because he was a rez rescue dog, a dog of uncertain heritage, one of a large number of unclaimed dogs and puppies that roam the Navajo Reservation, scions of working dogs that herd sheep on the mesas and plateaus.
We brought him home. We took him out on hikes in the woods, through the Ponderosa pines. We would stand at either end of a large meadow, and call, and he would run lolloping from one end of the meadow to the other, his tongue hanging out. We took him to puppy training, and he learned to come when called (mostly), and to walk politely on the leash, and a few other things.
He was a good dog, for us, but not a good dog for other people. Our theory was that he had been beaten as a puppy, because if you moved just right, he would flinch, and he hated men. Women he would tolerate, but men were Bad. Except, of course, for OmegaDad.
He wouldn’t get into the garbage. After the first few months, he learned that he did not get people food, and he was okay with that. He did chew out the crotch of any pair of undies you left out accidentally, so we learned not to do that. He didn’t beg the way many dogs did–he would just sit there erect, ears alert, and give you an “I am a Very Good Dog” look, one that said, “You know I’m a Good Dog, so you know I deserve a treat. Don’t you? Don’t you?”
He loved chew toys. He would chew them down to frayed knots, and we would remove the knots when they got too smelly and icky, and give him a new rope toy.
When OmegaDotter came along, he didn’t really like her. He never really liked her, and regularly growled and snapped at her…but he kept it within limits. The good thing about her, he realized when she transitioned to real people food, was that she dropped food at the table, so she became tolerable. Not one of his favorites, but definitely tolerable–enough so that she could hold the leash when we went hiking, enough so that she could lean on him (up to a certain point), and tug on him (up to a certain point).
When we moved to Alaska, he joined OmegaDad on the long drive up, getting to see bears and foxes and moose and other wild critters. He put up with the Shoe Box and our cramped living there. And when we moved into our new house, he delighted in the big back yard–though, since there was no fence, and we had a Mean Neighbor in the back who made singularly threatening noises the time or two Kai loped through the forest in our back into his yard. The threatening noises included, at the end, something that sounded like “I’ll shoot him if he comes over here again!”, so poor Kai was thereafter confined to leash on his outings in the yard.
Last year, in May, Kai had a horrible bout of vomiting and bloody diarrhea that culminated in a large whitish chunk being upchucked. We hauled him to the vet, who dissected the whitish chunk only to discover it was the knot of a rope chew toy. We immediately threw out all the chew toys we had, and poor Kai was without them.
So we have no idea where he got the rope knot that got stuck in his gut this time. It may have been while we were out hiking. It may have been a piece of detritus from the previous owners.
The latest surgery didn’t work. OmegaDad and I visited yesterday, and today. When we visited today, poor Kai could barely walk when we tried to take him out for a pee. When we returned inside, he slipped on the tile floor, and fell all splayed out, and didn’t get up.
The vet ran another blood test after we visited, and the results were bad. His liver values–which were what prompted the third surgery, in hopes of finding a way to dump the bile that was accumulating–were going up again, instead of down. The kidney numbers were surging. When the vet put a catheter in to let him pee, nothing came out. The end verdict: renal failure.
So OmegaDad and I went back to the vet’s, and said goodbye to Kai. We cuddled him, we petted him, we told him he wasn’t going to have to hurt anymore, and Dr. Shauna injected him with the two shots, and he was gone…just like that. It was quiet, and peaceful, and we all cried, and then we came home to a house without a dawg.
