I'm afraid this isn't anything more than a really sad venting. There's no one who can tell me what to do, or give advice, or anything. I have to get through it on my own. But I had to get it out.
I have nearly 16 year old husky that I have had for 15 years. She was a rescue, and she is fear aggressive due to her past abuse. We had over ten amazing years, but now that she is old she is getting snappy again. I had been planning to put her down a couple weeks before my due date, but she was still so full of life that I couldn't do it. I couldn't have my daughter's birth and my dog's death be part of the same event.
For the last week or so, I have been noticing that her legs were a little weaker. She still seemed ok otherwise, though. I thought about putting her down, but the first complication is that someone is renting our house right now. Sounds odd, but we don't own the house we live in. Our house is 3 hours away in Acadia, where I lived until I lost my job (the school I worked at closed) and had to move. We have kept the house by renting it out by the week in the summer, and we managed to actually rent a week in October, which with me on maternity leave and not getting paid sounded like a godsend. I want to bury her up there, so I figured we'd wait until they left on the 15th and see how Janie (my dog) was doing then.
I am currently 41 weeks pregnant. I've been having some contractions, but as of yesterday cervix is high, closed, and posterior. We have an ultrasound Tuesday morning. My parents are on call to come watch the dog.
Last night Janie fell down the one step into our yard. She must have hurt herself, because she continued to fall all night long. Neither dh nor I got any sleep, because she kept having so much trouble. You can't just pick her up though - she's not in pain, we don't think, because we've been managing that with meds pretty successfully. But not being able to get up is really scary, and she's a fear aggressive dog, so she tries to bite us whenever we try to help her get up.
All of this happened on the Friday night of a holiday weekend. The vet is closed until Tuesday, and I really don't want to take her to the emergency room. We'd have to get her into the car somehow, and then she would die in fear at the hands of humans. Given her first year of life, I had always planned on having her put down at home. I even found a vet that does home visits, but of course, she's closed. And even if I do manage to get her put down, I can't bury her, because there's people at our house. I can deal with that, I can cremate her, but I am really struggling with the idea of the emergency room, and even if I could deal with that, I don't know how I would get here there.
I can deal with getting her through till Tuesday. But will Izzy wait that long to make her appearance? I am really afraid that I will be exhausted and overwrought and it will affect my labor. My doula said that if I haven't slept the night before labor that I might have to have an epidural, which I really don't want (besides everything else about them, I just have a fear of anything in my spine). I am worried that I will enter labor exhausted and end up with a C/S. The doula also suggested that the reason my cervix is so closed is because I am so preoccupied with making sure the dog is ok that my body is too tense to give birth. Which, unfortunately, makes sense to me.
I know a lot of people would say that Janie is "just a dog," and that I should just put her down right now, emergency room or not. I wish it was that easy. Janie was my lifeline through some pretty dark times in my life, and she might be "just a dog" but I owe her a peaceful death.
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