[Freado]

This is one of the most difficult post to write, but I would like to thank you all for caring and sharing your thoughts with me. Mostly, you all have helped me to realize that there are other people in this world who love their little fur-kids deeply, like myself. Yesterday was a tough day for me. Husband and I had a boat built. Freado always liked to go boating with us. He liked to be with us, and I'm hoping it wasn't just for the treat factor, Freado was a true chow hound, he'd do anything for a scrap. It took roughly two years and during that time Freado was right by our side, just like when we built the house, he went from show-room to show-room with us picking out everything from plumbing fixtures, fabrics, to door hardware. We had countless meetings, with him sitting right next to me. During those two years I never pictured him not being right there by our side, on this new boat with us. It just wasn't a thought. It was just assumed he'd be sharing in this next journey with Husband and I. At the age of 14 he started to really show signs of deterioration. At first it was the typical stuff, cloudy eyes, a little hearing loss, which we labeled as "selective hearing". I started to notice that when we would come home, if gone for 5 minutes or 5 hours, he'd be sleeping on a rug in the furthest part of our closet. Then he started to have liver and kidney issues. But what really took him, was arthritis. He had arthritis for several years, but was managed with occasional medication. When Freado was young, his right knee blew-out. We had it fixed, but almost a year to the day later, his left one blew-out as well. We had it fixed and sometimes he would walk a little sideways, made my little "radar ear" dog even cuter. As with most everything, we learn from our mistakes. Our mistake was allowing Freado to jump off and on furniture, something we won't let our next fur-child do. Yes, we do plan to have another fur-child in the near future, but that will be a separate post. I started carrying him down the stairs to go potty, because he wasn't able to make that trip anymore. What really amazed us, was how quickly the arthritis took over his little body. It seemed as though one day we turned around and bam, he was no longer our happy little boy. The arthritis got so bad that after he would lay down and go to sleep, he would jump up yelping in such great pain, that he no longer wanted to sleep in bed with us, which really made me extremely sad, he would rather roam the house than lay down and get so stiff that it hurt him that bad to get back up. This all happened in less than two weeks. It killed us to see him in such pain and that is when we knew. Everyone said we'd know when the right time would be. I didn't understand how we were supposed to know, but they were right, it's just something that happens. We made arrangements for our most wonderful vet in the world to come to the house. This past week, as we brought our new boat home, a helicopter was taking pictures of us while we were underway and my Husband turned to me and said, "I wish Freado was here, he's been in every one of our boat pictures."...