[TheTrinks]

Thanks everyone. This has been one of the most difficult times in both of our lives. It's not just that she died, which is bad enough. It's just that she seemed ok a few weeks ago, then things started happening that we would chalk up to other things (just moved, new food, etc). Then, yesterday morning, she just started with the extreme severe symptoms.

I want to be clear that we don't know definitively that it was CHF. It was just the vets best guess, and mine. The other real possibility is bowel obstruction. She was not the type of dog to eat random things, and we mostly leashed walked her. So, if it was obstruction, based on the amount of the blood that she coughed up, it could have been an ulcer or something like that, that ruptured. Really who knows...

Most of her symptoms line up with CHF, though. The hard part was that Sprinkle was always slow, quiet, and lethargic. She was always tired, and never really ran around. This is not only a symptom of a slowly enlarging heart, but signals dogs give when they are in distress. When she got real bad in the last day or 2, we didn't really notice anything different because she was ALWAYS like that. She skipped dinner the night before, but she's done that plenty of times.

After 2 days of playing "monday morning quarterback", I think I'm finally starting to accept that we couldn't have done anything to prevent it. She will be missed forever. A perfect dog for our family. I know she's digging on a big pillow up in heaven right now, and curling up for a long nights sleep.

Thanks again everyone.