RIP Jake

Monday night was a very long, crazy night for us. It's crazy to me how quickly life can change...literally in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately, we lost our big dog, Jake that night...he was happy and healthy at dinner, but by 2 am, he had all but shut down on us.

We were completely clueless of a complication called 'twisted gut', but apparently it is a very common thing in Jake's breed of dogs-Weimereiners and Great Danes, too. To sum it up, the stomach traps a large amount of gas within it, expands, and then more or less twists itself closed at each end-the esophagus end and the other...extremely painful. Basically, all circulatory blood flow is cut off and the dog goes into shock and later cardiac arrest.

Of course, we had no idea that this even happened to dogs. Had never HEARD of such a thing. We called the vet and while he did TELL us about the possibility of twisted gut, he thought that maybe Jake just had gas and to give him pepto, mineral oil, and gas-x. He told us that if that didn't work and he was in fact suffering from bloat, there is nothing that can be done without surgery...which would have to be done hours away due to lack of staff at our vet. We later tried to call our vet back and never could reach him again. He never returned our calls.

Bad went to worse and we knew that Jake was suffering with something that we could not stop or treat. We called TONS of vets all over town and none were available or even helpful for that matter. I was absolutely LIVID. And scared. We have no 24 hour vet services in this town, so I started to Google places around us that we could take him. We feared the worse, but thought maybe we could get him in for surgery that night-somewhere.

I found a hopital for him, an hour away! My husband loaded Jake up and drove him at 2 am to the 24 hour clinic. The vet knew as soon as she saw him that he was in bad shape...apparently minutes from dying. His breathing was ragged and he did in fact have severe twisted gut. It had moved his intestines out of place, relocated and split his spleen-it was not a good picture. They offered surgery to us and we had a decision to make. Pay $2,000 for the surgery, that he had about a 20% chance of surviving. OR-put him down. I know my husband was so upset, but when you simply don't have $2,000, you don't have it. And with those odds, he likely wouldn't have survived the surgery anyways. We decided to let Jake go. =(

Cody has taken it pretty well-he can't really talk about it much. And Pax still doesn't know that he is gone. When she asks us where Jake is, we will tell her. She is very tenderhearted and can get emotional easily and I don't want to upset her until she is curious where he is.

We had Jake 5 years-before we had Paxtin and just after we had gotten married. He was a great dog-super goofy and a big baby. We will all miss him very much.

This was Jake the night he died. I was trying to talk to him and make him comfortable-you can see in his eyes just how bad off he was. =(