And then there were two.... RIP Big boy.
0 Comments Published by Oh Wayward One on 26 August 2010 at 8/26/2010 12:36:00 pm.
Well what a freakin' emotional roller coaster this week has turned out to be. No, scratch that, it's just been pretty crap all around. But I suppose after a killer fun weekend in Joburg last weekend inclusive of standup comedy, lotsa drinks with Uncle A., a new pair of jeans and blouse, new Harley gear for The Mr.'s birthday present, excellent Vietnamese food, and lots of laughs, the axe was bound to fall somehow.
Working backwards, we lost our big boy Jock. Yesterday evening I took him for a run to try and clear my head from all the BS I've been dealing with already this week, and when we came back he just collapsed and wouldn't get up, but was panting and puffing like he always does when he's exhausted so I just monitored him for a couple hours hoping he would shake it off. This, I might mention, was after I had to call Alois to come with his pickup truck to help me get him up the hill to our house because he was like a 120lb/55kg sack of rocks and I couldn't do it by myself and OF COURSE The Mr. is in Zambia. Once I could see him start to spasm, I phoned friend/vet DD and asked what I should do, and he said take him into the hosp. at once. Which of course meant I had to settle down, get The Kid out of bed, in the car (because I'm home alone), find someone who would be awake (this is at nighttime now) to help me lift him up into the truck which ultimately involved driving down to the security gate and hijacking the security man from his post (typical me, I just didn't want to have to ask for help and bother anyone so this is all after I tried my damndest for 10 minutes to lift him on my own but that was just not happening). Drove to the vet as fast as I could and then the on-call vet didn't show up for almost an hour, during which time, he died in the back of the vehicle. I knew it the instant it happened because the laboured breathing turned into a seizure and then the loud "noise of death" where everything just lets go/burns out. I knew, but got out of the truck and went around back to check, and got there just in time to feel his heart stop beating. I was so sad I just used the rest of the waiting-in-the-dark-and-the-stink (it's biology, it's what happens) time to cry my eyeballs out.
Of course I feel guilty as well as sad because I keep thinking "what if I hadn't run so far?" "what if I would've called DD earlier?" (again I just don't like to bug people) but both vets said a bad heart is a bad heart and a heart attack/stroke is what it is and they happen. Period. But I still can't stop wondering... and sobbing... I couldn't even talk to The Mr. (who was beside himself wondering, by this stage, 20 hours away after getting the "rushing to vet" text message from me) because my battery died on my phone. Ugh.
By the time I finally got home and re-put the LJJ to bed and remembered to eat something, it was pretty late and I felt really numb and clueless so I just went to bed and stared at the walls all night, which sucked because I was exhausted this morning.
So prior to the losing-man's-best-friend, life was generally already in the shitter as A) The Mr. was summoned away to Zam. and B) marital relations were all around edgy and negative as we had spent the first part of the week literally in angry deliberation about this whole proposed-family-cruise thing I mentioned in my last post.
Little did I know it wasn't as easy as saying "thanks but no thanks". Sunday night I called the Gran to politely decline and chose to use the "it just wouldn't be possible to lay out another 40k on flights to get to New Orleans, after just returning from 3 weeks in In-law Land" excuse. Except then she trumped me with "but I will pay for those tickets too".
Huh?
And then: "I would really love to have you there..., etc" followed by negotiation tactics including the words "once-in-a-lifetime-thing", and "one-time-only-offer", etc etc....
Great.
So fuelled with guilt and genuine interest in going (I mean who WOULDNT want to go on an all-expenses-paid cruise around the carribbean with the hi-larry fun cousins?) as well as the nagging feeling of "there goes your one and only good/acceptable excuse... if you say no now, it'll be black-sheep-ville for the rest of your life" (as if that isnt already the case). I propose to The Mr. that we go. He (for lack of 3,000 pages in which to transcribe what happened next) does NOT want to go. It's too hard. It'll be too much trouble. We're JUST getting back from europe, we can't leave the office for so long all the time, you're living in dreamworld, what-what-what.
So then I say to him, fine, this is your decision then, you call and tell them no. Oh, but then that would make HIM the bad guy instead of me so now all of a sudden "fine, we'll go, but I'm going to resent you forever" and all that crap.... so then I'm all "NO! We're not going then, because I don't want to put up with all the negative juju and resent ment" and this basically goes on for 2 days. Fun times. These things always ruin my life while they're happening, as sometimes the down side of being a couple who generally never fights means that when you DO have a real barney, it tends to make you want to jump off a bridge or, alternatively, (for me anyway) just plain crawl in a hole of depression and die. While simultaneously NOT SLEEPING. And for the record it has nothing to do with this damn boat trip, it's all about the resentment/accusations and the basic side dishes of aggro that come with the big main course of the original disagreement.
Anyway, I guess the saving grace finally came from The Mominator, who upon becoming exasperated at not getting a yes/no answer from us after repeatedly asking for one (tickets were being booked once and for all, and we were still "undecided"), finally emailed a very clear "please do not come, your grandmother had no idea what she was offering ($$$$) when she said that", which at least solved the issue between us. Well, the tip-of-the-iceberg issue anyway. After 2 days of anger in the house, there's a lot more than just that one core issue to deal with. But coming from the Mominator, it was like the golden ticket we needed to decline without hesitation... basically because one of my motivating reasons for saying "ok, fine we'll come if you're paying" was that I'm kinda sick and tired of always being the black sheep who is never around for family things.... reunions, funerals, birthdays, holidays, etc etc. And I really wasn't keen on the idea of the rumor circulating around that "oh, THEY'Re not coming because they dont give a crap about this family and they NEVER come to anything... They choose to live overseas but then they say it's too expensive.... yet they keep going to Europe and Australia and Canada and yadda yadda yadda.... so then Grandma offered to pay and then they STILL said no...."
But now, The Mominator will gladly take the heat for driving the nail into that coffin, so that's good.
So to make a long story a little less long, this week = bad vibes, alone on mommy duty, my big buddy dies, and here I sit. Sad. For now.
Working backwards, we lost our big boy Jock. Yesterday evening I took him for a run to try and clear my head from all the BS I've been dealing with already this week, and when we came back he just collapsed and wouldn't get up, but was panting and puffing like he always does when he's exhausted so I just monitored him for a couple hours hoping he would shake it off. This, I might mention, was after I had to call Alois to come with his pickup truck to help me get him up the hill to our house because he was like a 120lb/55kg sack of rocks and I couldn't do it by myself and OF COURSE The Mr. is in Zambia. Once I could see him start to spasm, I phoned friend/vet DD and asked what I should do, and he said take him into the hosp. at once. Which of course meant I had to settle down, get The Kid out of bed, in the car (because I'm home alone), find someone who would be awake (this is at nighttime now) to help me lift him up into the truck which ultimately involved driving down to the security gate and hijacking the security man from his post (typical me, I just didn't want to have to ask for help and bother anyone so this is all after I tried my damndest for 10 minutes to lift him on my own but that was just not happening). Drove to the vet as fast as I could and then the on-call vet didn't show up for almost an hour, during which time, he died in the back of the vehicle. I knew it the instant it happened because the laboured breathing turned into a seizure and then the loud "noise of death" where everything just lets go/burns out. I knew, but got out of the truck and went around back to check, and got there just in time to feel his heart stop beating. I was so sad I just used the rest of the waiting-in-the-dark-and-the-stink (it's biology, it's what happens) time to cry my eyeballs out.
Of course I feel guilty as well as sad because I keep thinking "what if I hadn't run so far?" "what if I would've called DD earlier?" (again I just don't like to bug people) but both vets said a bad heart is a bad heart and a heart attack/stroke is what it is and they happen. Period. But I still can't stop wondering... and sobbing... I couldn't even talk to The Mr. (who was beside himself wondering, by this stage, 20 hours away after getting the "rushing to vet" text message from me) because my battery died on my phone. Ugh.
By the time I finally got home and re-put the LJJ to bed and remembered to eat something, it was pretty late and I felt really numb and clueless so I just went to bed and stared at the walls all night, which sucked because I was exhausted this morning.
So prior to the losing-man's-best-friend, life was generally already in the shitter as A) The Mr. was summoned away to Zam. and B) marital relations were all around edgy and negative as we had spent the first part of the week literally in angry deliberation about this whole proposed-family-cruise thing I mentioned in my last post.
Little did I know it wasn't as easy as saying "thanks but no thanks". Sunday night I called the Gran to politely decline and chose to use the "it just wouldn't be possible to lay out another 40k on flights to get to New Orleans, after just returning from 3 weeks in In-law Land" excuse. Except then she trumped me with "but I will pay for those tickets too".
Huh?
And then: "I would really love to have you there..., etc" followed by negotiation tactics including the words "once-in-a-lifetime-thing", and "one-time-only-offer", etc etc....
Great.
So fuelled with guilt and genuine interest in going (I mean who WOULDNT want to go on an all-expenses-paid cruise around the carribbean with the hi-larry fun cousins?) as well as the nagging feeling of "there goes your one and only good/acceptable excuse... if you say no now, it'll be black-sheep-ville for the rest of your life" (as if that isnt already the case). I propose to The Mr. that we go. He (for lack of 3,000 pages in which to transcribe what happened next) does NOT want to go. It's too hard. It'll be too much trouble. We're JUST getting back from europe, we can't leave the office for so long all the time, you're living in dreamworld, what-what-what.
So then I say to him, fine, this is your decision then, you call and tell them no. Oh, but then that would make HIM the bad guy instead of me so now all of a sudden "fine, we'll go, but I'm going to resent you forever" and all that crap.... so then I'm all "NO! We're not going then, because I don't want to put up with all the negative juju and resent ment" and this basically goes on for 2 days. Fun times. These things always ruin my life while they're happening, as sometimes the down side of being a couple who generally never fights means that when you DO have a real barney, it tends to make you want to jump off a bridge or, alternatively, (for me anyway) just plain crawl in a hole of depression and die. While simultaneously NOT SLEEPING. And for the record it has nothing to do with this damn boat trip, it's all about the resentment/accusations and the basic side dishes of aggro that come with the big main course of the original disagreement.
Anyway, I guess the saving grace finally came from The Mominator, who upon becoming exasperated at not getting a yes/no answer from us after repeatedly asking for one (tickets were being booked once and for all, and we were still "undecided"), finally emailed a very clear "please do not come, your grandmother had no idea what she was offering ($$$$) when she said that", which at least solved the issue between us. Well, the tip-of-the-iceberg issue anyway. After 2 days of anger in the house, there's a lot more than just that one core issue to deal with. But coming from the Mominator, it was like the golden ticket we needed to decline without hesitation... basically because one of my motivating reasons for saying "ok, fine we'll come if you're paying" was that I'm kinda sick and tired of always being the black sheep who is never around for family things.... reunions, funerals, birthdays, holidays, etc etc. And I really wasn't keen on the idea of the rumor circulating around that "oh, THEY'Re not coming because they dont give a crap about this family and they NEVER come to anything... They choose to live overseas but then they say it's too expensive.... yet they keep going to Europe and Australia and Canada and yadda yadda yadda.... so then Grandma offered to pay and then they STILL said no...."
But now, The Mominator will gladly take the heat for driving the nail into that coffin, so that's good.
So to make a long story a little less long, this week = bad vibes, alone on mommy duty, my big buddy dies, and here I sit. Sad. For now.
Labels: RIP
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