Hi everyone. My name is Jenny and my little Yorkie girl was Casey. We rescued her from the street. I was on my way home from work one morning in 2005 when I spotted this adorable little Yorkie walking down my sidewalk. She followed me right into our garage. She had a collar but no tags. I brought her inside and got her some water. I let her wander around my back yard which is fenced with my Dachsie. But we knew we had to find her owner. It turned out that she belonged to a neighbor 2 doors down. They looked so relieved to be getting her back. They said they had adopted her from our local shelter 2 weeks before that. I noticed that she was older as she had really bad cataracts. A few days later my husband saw her walking down the sidewalk across the street. He took her back to her home again. About a month later we thought that we saw her at the house next door to us. We went to those neighbor and asked how she got there. We were told that little Casey had almost been hit by a car right out in front of our homes a week or so before. Prior to that, they had also returned her to her former home. When she almost got hit, the neighbor went to take her home and asked her owners if they even wanted her. The response was unbelievable. Those people ran to get her blanket and food and said that she was just not their kind of dog! Dave and Azalea took her in knowing that they could not keep her but would try to find a no-kill shelter for her not knowing that we had the same experiences with her. We gladly took her into our home. We took her to the vet who said that she definitely had cataracts that were far too bad to do anything about. She had a huge bladder stone with the consistency of a pine cone which have a photo of. Most of her teeth were bad and had to come out. She had a collapsing trachea as well! They guesstimated her to be anywhere from 7 to 11 years old but could not pinpoint it due to her condition and not really knowing where she came from. It definitely was not our local shelter because she had not been fixed and they do not adopt out until they are healthy and altered! Those first neighbors just did not want to foot the bill to help her get healthy again! In my heart I believed back then, and still do, that she was a castoff from a puppy mill after she had served her purpose. In her 3 1/2 years with us she knew unconditional love. She was spoiled beyond belief and any health issue that arose was treated. Several times we thought we were going to lose her but she hung in there and got better.
The middle of November last year, right after I had back surgery, her trachea got much much worse. She had meds to take that seemed to help a little but not for long. She would only have restful periods of about an hour or so before she would start gasping for air and coughing. Then she would go right back to playing and barking as if she were a puppy. She slept with us in our bed. Well, actually, we slept with her because she took up the whole bed and kept pushing us over and she was only 5 pounds! That last night she could not even make it 45 minutes before having trouble. We had to make the decision to stop being so selfish by making her continue to be so miserable just so that we could have her with us. Even our vets cried with us that awful morning of January 8th, 2008. We lost our precious little girl but we have her back home with us. We have her ashes in a beautiful wooden urn with an interchangeable photo frame and a plaque engraved for her. We have place it on our fireplace mantel when we are downstairs and on a nightstand at night when we go to bed.
We miss her so very much but take solace in the fact that we made the last part of her life special.
We just adopted a YorkiePoo puppy who also has some medical issues that are birth defects. He is happy in his new home with his new big brother.
