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damb |
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Jun 11, 2016 19:13
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 10:26 |
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I was at governor's school, a college-like program for nerdy kids between 11 and 12th grade, having the time of my goddamn life and meeting lots of cool friends. I had just gotten a cell phone for the first time so my parents could keep in touch with me (early-ish days of cell phones). It rang at about 7:30 am before i woke up and before answering i knew something was wrong. Then the first thing I heard was my mom was crying on the other end. My dog was dead. Cody was a golden retriever, only about 6 years old. He was a lovable dummy with a huge head and a love of running around the yard like a nut. Rewind When he was 5, he had a weird stroke that mostly paralyzed him from the waist down. We were in the kitchen and suddenly he seemed upset and unable to stand up, despite clearly trying. We took him to the animal hospital and they said the damage was already done and there's nothing we could have done. So for the next month, we did physical therapy with his hind legs, we used doggy diapers, we cleaned up his poo poo from his butt all the time. He learned to walk by swinging his waist forward to pull his hind legs up. He seemed mostly happy just to have us around but kind of scared. The saddest thing for him was at night, when we went upstairs to bed and he couldn't. The first night he cried at the bottom of the stairs until i decided to come down and sleep on the couch. He was a lot happier. He got more used to it, so did we. Eventually, he could feel a poop starting to come out; he couldn't control it but he could frantically ask to go outside. To pee, we had to regularly go out with him and squeeze his sides to express his bladder; doing this regularly kept him from dripping in the house and kept him from doggy diapers, which he hated. After 3 months, he could full on run, pulling his hind legs along with him. And I was still sleeping on the couch every night to keep him company. I slept on the couch every night for about a year, until i went to gov school. Forward My mom told me that Cody was dead. She couldn't say much more than that. He died this morning. Like, he had just died and she was calling. My dad took the phone to say Cody died doing what he loved. He was coming home from a walk and saw a rabbit and ran after it. We always joked that if he ever caught up to a rabbit he'd just sniff it and lick it and wag his tail. While he was running after the rabbit in his funny paralyzed run, he just... fell. And he started breathing really heavily. My dad watched him die right there. Breathing heavily, then slower, then not at all. My dad described in detail the death and the breathing for some reason. Even though i didn't see it, the image still haunts me to this day. I can't get it out of my head. I still went to class that day. I don't know why, I sat in the back and cried in every class. |
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Jun 11, 2016 19:34
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I cried writing that and i still cry every time i tell that story |
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Jun 11, 2016 19:35
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I'm sorry mister magpie |
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Jun 12, 2016 22:29
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Jun 15, 2016 15:13
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