Two days ago, we said goodbye to our Ms. Sophie, our sweet little girl. I’ll start by sharing that we still have many questions, and we have realized that they probably won’t ever be answered as to why she left the living world. It’s been really hard, and with this being our second dog that has passed away around the holidays, they have lost a lot of their excitement.
As anyone knows who has loved a furry pet, you get attached to them. I have long thought that humans only have half the capacity to return the love that a dog (in particular) lavishes on their humans. Sophie was a result of my not being able to live in an empty house (of dogs) since Colby passed away. We said we’d give ourselves twelve months, but I lasted eight (not bad, when you think about it).
Sophie was adopted on Christmas Eve, 2014, but didn’t officially join our squad until our squad until December 27th. She broke into our hearts the very day we met her, through to the last day of her life on December 22, 2022.
Back around the holidays in 2018, Sophie had some health issues that no-one seemed to be able to figure out. We thought she’d had a stroke of some kind, but a four-year-old dog normally doesn’t have that kind of condition. She got better, but she never really recovered.
Fast forward to 2022, around Thanksgiving, she got sick which required some antibiotics and steroids, and lots and lots of love. The vet wasn’t really able to figure out what was going on, and we were having flashbacks to four years earlier when she was last not well. We did start to see an improvement as her second round of treatment began, including a new medication for her liver due to some issues with her enzymes in that part of her body. It seemed like this may have been the solution, as she rebounded to her normal self, until the evening of December 21st and the morning of the 22nd.
I’m not going to share the what and how right now (maybe at some point in the future), but after finding Sophie unresponsive on the morning of the 22nd we rushed her to our vet where they did everything they could to figure out what was going on and make her better, but that wasn’t to be. She passed away that morning, as snow flakes were trying to form and fall to the ground. She was eight years old.
Our hearts ache with this sadness. She was most definitely our sweet little angel, and we miss her terribly.