Our Little Harley Passed Unexpectedly 11.16.2016

Hello.

Having a tough time since one of our pack passed away. Harley was our sweet little shih tzu, only 6 years old.

He was only lethargic and not eating normally for 3 days, which he had done before at this time of year. We setup a vet appointment for him on Thursday, Nov 17. We thought the vet would just get us some allergy meds as usual and all would be well. We had no reason to think he was terminal.

Wednesday morning I let the babies go potty, and when Harley came back in, he acted as if he wanted me to put him on the doggy cot, and I did so. When I got out of the shower, he was holding up his right paw, and I thought he had injured it jumping off the cot (which was odd, because the cot is only 3" off the ground).

This was at 4am, no vets were open, so I called my fiancee who would be home in a couple of hours and told her we needed to take him to the vet that day when she got home. He didn't whimper when I touched it, and when I put him on the ground the other dogs came to check him out and he kinda wanted them to back off, so I placed him in a crate so he would not injure himself further. I told him momma would be home soon and we would get him fixed up.

A few of hours went by, and when my fiancee contacted me, she told me that Harley had stopped breathing on the way to the vet and that they were trying to intubate him. 15 minutes later, she broke the news that our baby was dead. His lungs were full of blood.

The vet isn't sure what happened (we didn't want our Harley butchered, and there was no guarantee the vet would find out the cause of death) but we are fairly certain now that he had congestive heart failure. Our poor baby died in pain.

The guilt is so strong. I know I cannot change anything. We did the best we could. I wrote a letter to him I will read at his funeral today and a letter back from him forgiving us.

I have never felt so down in my life, and I have been through some bad things. Yesterday I felt so numb, like I was in quicksand, and it feels like a bad dream and I keep hoping to wake up.
Today I just started crying out of no where and I still am, even at work.

This feeling is terrible, but I am doing everything I can think of to grieve and make sure I go through the process, no matter how long it might take, this has the potential to really screw with my head. I have to get through this so I can be a good dad to our remaining fur babies.

I built him a little coffin, put in a pillow with a nice cover, rubbed lavender oil on the pillow and Harley and put his favorite toy under his arm and covered him with another pillow case. This was actually helpful, a final act of love I could show our baby.

I can't seem to fully accept that he is gone, he was always around...when I would cook a steak in a pan, he would bark at the sizzling noises, he would always greet me at the door, he would playfully growl at me when I said hi in the morning, he was my football watching buddy, he always followed me into the bathroom.

I keep trying to picture him in his final resting place to remind myself that he is gone.

Lesson learned though, I am going to start a fund so that we can take any of our babies to the first available vet , no matter how much it costs (or how far away that might be) (not that it mattered before, but now it officially does not matter).

Harley was my fiancees first fur baby (had him before we met and Stormy, our lab). She did not want a dog before she took Harley in from her mom...then she met me. We adopted a puppy together, then when we moved into a house, we adopted 6 more senior dogs and we are fostering 2 more.

His legacy will last and we will continue to take the dogs that everyone else passes up...the heart worms, blind, seemingly crazy, super timid., no teeth....the forgotten ones.

Maybe his purpose was to be the gateway for my fiancee to be a fur mom so we could take in as many as we can and give them love.

But no amount of memorializing is helping us in this moment. The pain is real and terrible. I fully expect all our babies will pass away at some point, but this was unexpected and that hurts the most...Harley loved babies and I wanted him to be around our future children.

I know that the flip side of this is you have to love to lose, but the emptiness is so hard to deal with. Our house feels empty without Harley.