I’m back but with a Heavy Heart

Shelby Baker
1996-June 3, 2011

This is my reason for my recent absence from blogging.  We had to put our sweet dog Shelby, who had brought so much happiness to our family for the past 12 years, to sleep on my birthday. This picture was taken in April, isn’t she so cute?   Now that I look at the picture, she seemed to not be her happy self, since she usually always appeared to be smiling for the camera! 

We got Shelby in 1999 to be a companion for our lab Jazz who was just a year old.  They became fast buddies until one night Jazz got out of the back fence and we woke the next morning to just find Shelby back there.  We never found Jazz, and although I think Shelby missed her, she was perfectly content to be the only animal in our family!  But she went on having to deal with the 2 cats we still had so she ended up just being the only dog in our family!  Shelby never liked to play with toys, although one day last year when we weren’t paying that much attention to her, picked up one of Elsie’s toys and threw it in the air and it knocked down a few things on the TV and fell behind it.  It was pretty funny! 

Shelby was a Daddy’s girl…whenever John was at home, she plopped herself down on the floor right next to him. Whenever he wasn’t at home, she would lay in those same spots, waiting for him.  She was always so happy when he came home!  She also LOVED living at the property!  We were blessed to have her for as long as we did, especially because she was diagnosed with a tumor on her lung Nov 6 ‘09 that I shared here.  Over the 19 months we still had her around, we enjoyed each day she would greet us with a wag of her tail in the mornings and evenings.  We listened to her cough change a lot over the months, seeming to get better & worse at times.  But when we took her to the vet last Summer, the vet was inclined to say it didn’t appear that her tumor was cancerous and was perhaps a fatty tumor like she had in other parts of her body, a result of her aging.  But when we stopped eating her crunchy food a few weeks ago and had a sore on the bottom of her mouth on the right, we knew something was wrong.  The vet ended up finding a tumor in her mouth from her molars to her esophagus which explained a lot.  Our difficult decision was not that hard to make considering her age, the fact that she was not taking her medicine, eating or drinking much and the fact that we just could not put her through more suffering, we knew it was the right thing to do.  However, it was still so hard to endure but we had to be the ones she would see when she took her last breaths.  I take comfort in the fact she is no longer suffering and we will see her again in Heaven but it hurts my heart so much to have this emptiness in the house and in our hearts.