this week my baby girl at 10 was diagnosed with inoperable aggressive anal sac adenocarcinoma that went from not noticable to swelling up her entire anal area and passing red blood in three days. She had a tumor inside that was so large the vet said they would not be able to remove it. They also could not do additional tests or biopsies because it would cause non healing fistulas and wounds like they had experienced before with her.

The only option left was palliative treatment with antibiotics and anti-iflammatories to try and get it to where she did not have to strain to pass diarrhea and wait for her to reach a level of pain where we could say she was “suffering”.

She ate, she drank and though she laid on the couch all day long, she perked up when we came in over the next few days.

It was when we found during that same weekend that we had to fight her to get medicine in her and cause extreme pain to put what little medicine we could on the swelling that I realized she would not understand why we would be shoving pills down her throat and constantly touching the part that hurt most. All she would understand is that the two people who she loved most in the world keep hurting her.

So we stopped all the pills, etc. We could not make her scared of us. We then wrestled with euthanasia. She could still smile, she could still wag. She could still sniff the grass. But she was a trooper with a high pain tolerance.

We saw her skin starting to tear at the swelling, we saw the blood when she went to the bathroom. We knew that even a human would be in severe pain, but she kept eating (she even ate an hour after having pins in her leg…)

We realized then that what we were doing was waiting for her to make us feel good enough to let her go because it is so much easier on us to say we let them go because they were suffering. Do you really think your pet/child wants that?

The hardest decision is to let your pet go before they are in so much agony that they cant go on. It is to let them go because they have that terminal condition and that you know any treatment or waiting is going to extend or increase pain.

Some people say dont do it till they stop eating or can barely breath. Why? Because then you know they are in so much agony that they cant eat and you can feel good about yourself and your decision?

A long time ago, after the last surgery and perianal fistulas and 8 months of open would treatment, we said we would never do that again and that we would not force her to get deathly ill before we would help her.

We let her go yesterday. She walked into the room wagged. She licked my face. She sat on my lap (pretty hard for an 85 pound dog) and put her head in my arms…which she never did before and then laid their waiting. She passed away in my arms with my tears streaming down her fur.

When your pet has a terminal illness and all your treatment and care is going to do is cause pain. That is all they will understand. You giving them pain. You keep doing it until you feel they have given you enough pain to justify letting them go.

My dog was happy the day she left. She had no concept of the pain she was not going to have to endure. My dog went peacefully and instead I bear the pain. I always promised that when we knew that when that day came, I would take the pain this time instead of her and today she is happy and free and my heart is broken.

I know it will be right time to let her go when she can no longer walk up the stairs on her own. I am not sure if it is fair to the dog, but I don’t want to put it in any discomfortable poition. I believe that god will give us a way to follow. Thanks god for guiding us into the right direction.