Tough decisions, tough days

Wow, this week has been hard.  I guess I will just get right to it: our sweet dog, Kaya, might be dying.  We noticed right before my gallbladder surgery that she wasn't eating and that she would just down her water.  She was also vomiting a couple times a day.  We kept thinking it was just a bug or that she ate something weird and that it would pass.  Then she started eating some food but only for a day or two and then she began the water-only vomiting cycle all over again.  On Monday I took her to the vet and they did some blood work on her.  It came back abnormal; her white blood cell count is high as well as her calcium levels.  The vet seemed really baffled by the results so he sent her blood work to a lab just to be certain there wasn't a mistake. The next day he informed me that the blood work came back the same and added this bit of terrible news: she might have some type of cancer OR she is dying from some kind of rat poisoning. They are unsure which it is. Either way, they kept reiterating that it doesn't look good for her.  So right now what they want to do is get her calcium levels down as fast as they can through daily injections of medication for three weeks (I guess having high calcium levels will slowly shut down the muscles of the body - including the heart). Also, we have her on some kind of medication to keep her kidney's clean in the event that she did eat some poison and if it makes it to her kidneys she will basically pass away fairly quickly.  The vet did say there is a chance (hooray for chances!) that she only got a small amount of poison and that she could just be sick for a while and rebound - but that it would take several weeks.  And that is only IF she did in fact eat poison and it is 100% for sure not cancer. Anyway, we will go back in a week or two (or if she starts getting worse) to have her blood work done again. Let me also throw in there that I got this news in the midst of only having about an hour of sleep the night before because Toby had the stomach flu. So basically yesterday was a very bad day.

It is so hard to swallow that Kaya may leave us any day or in a few weeks....but hopefully (PLEASE hopefully) not at all. She is such a wonderful dog.  The perfect dog, really.  Great with kids, happy but not hyper, smart, cuddly, and so, so sweet.  She's been my buddy when Nick works the graveyard shift and I'm chillin' by myself in our haunted basement. Toby and Aspen adore her.  I really can't imagine life without our Kaya.  So yes, lots emotions going on right now.  And lots of wondering of what to do.  Nick and I keep saying that we just don't want her to be suffering, and that if she starts to show signs of that, we will probably have to make the tough decision of putting her down.  As of right now she walks a little stiff but she IS eating a little more - which is giving us hope.

So that was our week.  Right now we cling to hope.  Hoping each day she shows some improvement and praying that we can keep our cute, little corgi for many, many more years.