At a Loss

While most of the Sooner fans I’ve talked to are disappointed by the loss to Colorado over the weekend, I can’t say that I care too much at this point, as my family had a much bigger loss Saturday:  Bosco.

The day started off well.  The family and I were out running some errands, rushing to get back in time for kick off.  When we got home, there were two voice mails from the vet where Bosco and Abby are being kenneled while we wait for our new house to be ready.  In the message, she said she really needed to talk to me about Bosco, which didn’t sound good at all.  I called her back and she told me that Bosco was found that morning by the kennel staff to be very listless — not his perky self.  The vet examined him and found his mucous membranes had very little color and his abdomen was very swollen.  She put a needle in his abdomen and pulled out a “significant amount of blood.”  She had a number of possible causes, so she ran some tests and took an X-ray to try to find out for sure.  She was able to rule out two of three suspects, leaving the possibility of a ruptured tumor.  The X-ray was hard to read due to all of the fluid in his abdomen, but she saw enough to feel 75% confident that he had a tumor on his spleen that had ruptured.  She was filling in for our normal vet, so she called him and he concurred.  Given his age, they weren’t comfortable with surgery, saying “there’s a chance he’d do OK,” so we had to make the decision:  surgery or euthanasia.  With their appraisal of his chances and how miserable he was, we felt we only had one “good” choice.

At 3:30 Saturday, we arrived at the kennel to say our good-byes.  We spent a very short and very hard half an hour hugging on him.  It was extremely painful to walk away from him.  He was pretty instrumental in getting Angela and me together.  He was the gentlest of two dogs with Andrew:  he’d gently walk up and say “hi” to him, and then sit there meekly as Andrew whacked him with his plastic baseball bat (until we noticed what Andrew was doing and stopped him).  He was always more interested in talking to us than chasing the toy we had thrown (knowing, probably, that Abby would knock him off of it were he to try to get it).  He was a great dog.  It’s hard to believe he’s gone.  He was almost 8.

Mr. Bosco Vandelay

November 10, 1999 – September 29, 2007

Angela posted his picture at Bosco’s vet’s website.