We've made it to four weeks!

Saturday - June 28, 2013

So...there was a little bit of excitement last night.  If by excitement you mean running away from 2 coyotes following you and your mom while you're out strolling at 9 pm with your dog in his little stroller...yes, that's excitement.  What's sad?  We were totally and completely oblivious to this.  We were strolling in our SUPER SAFE super suburban upper middle class neighborhood when a car rolls up and a guy rolls down the window and leaning over, says, "excuse me?"  I bent down to his level thinking he was asking for directions.  Instead he said, "You ladies should know that there were two coyotes following you.  I scared them off, but they could come back, so you should be careful"

Uh...coyotes?  The only time I've ever seen coyotes here was in the middle of the night over 20 years ago when a whole family of them were lolling on the lawn of my neighbor's house across the street.  I have heard though (through La Verne's FB page) that there have been a recent rash of coyote attacks against household pets.  Our next door neighbor's elderly chow chow (Bento's girlfriend) was killed by coyotes earlier this year in their backyard - so I know they come down here.  But I didn't expect for them to be out at 9 pm when there were still people out for their evening strolls.  We passed by about 6-7 other people; some of them were walking dogs of their own.  So that freaked me out because nature and I...let's just say we're not best friends.  My mom and I totally freaked - we were about a mile away from home at this point - both of us in flip flops and pushing a stroller with our old sick dog in it. We zipped up his stoller and basically ran/jogged/powerwalked home totally anal and paranoid - viewing every single shadow and movement suspiciously.  I have to say, this was the most crazy stressful stroll I've ever taken.  I was tasked with pushing the stoller and running at a quick clip while my mama ran alongside me, she was to keep an eye out behind us to make sure the coyotes weren't following us. When we got to about 500 feet away from our house, we carefully unzipped a bit of the stroller top to grab out garage remote and then seriously booked it home - all while pushing a stroller with a bewildered Bento.  It was the first time we came back from an evening stroll out of breath and sweaty from exertion.

Bento has been kind of up and down.  He had a few bad days where he was pretty unresponsive and wouldn't even wag (or wiggle) his tail at me when I came home from work.  He went two days without eating anything but the porridge we forced in him.  On Thursday night we had the talk about euthanasia.  We had taken him for a walk in his stroller and unlike his usual curiosity and enthusiasm, he was...indifferent and/or oblivious.  It was disheartening as hell - nothing, not even his usual life-long favorite things roused him.  He just seemed to be in a stupor and his eyes seemed kind of glazed.  After our walk was when we had our talk.  My dad is adamantly against euthanasia - he wants Bento to just drift away in his sleep - and while I don't want to put my dog to sleep, if it gets to the point where he's just suffering with no spark in his life - I don't want to keep him here just for selfish reasons.  If there's something I can do to end his suffering joyless life, then as the responsible family member I should.  Keeping him around when he's in constant discomfort while unable to eat, drink, move or even relieve himself would be selfish even if it would comfort me.  So I went to work on Friday incredibly sad.  Honestly, each time I leave him I am cognizant of the fact that it may be the last time I see him alive - so I always cuddle him and talk to him, telling him that I love him and that he's the best dog in the world before I leave.  I feel the same before going to bed each night - I'm aware that he may not wake up in the morning so I always spend some time talking to him and hugging him before I go to sleep.

However, he had a very good day!  Well, for him considering his circumstances.  My mom said he requested some food - he made good eye contact all day - and his eyes seemed to be clear and aware. He wagged his little tail at me when I came back from work and would make little sounds at me when I cuddled him.  He even ate a whole chicken wing on his own!  He also licked through 2 ice cubes to combat his perpetually dry mouth.  This morning he woke up pretty aware - I fed him 2 tablespoons of his fresh porridge, got some more reglan syrup for him (he's already gone through 2 bottles!  When we got his first we really thought he'd never finish that bottle because we expected to go within days) from the vet, and went to Rowland Heights to buy a Chinese breakfast because we craved it in the middle of the night.

Now he's napping on the hardwood floors because he was displeased with the three beds we have spread around the living room and wasn't feeling the love for the very expensive carpet either.  I guess it's cooler on the hardwood floor :)

Anyway - I got the second video of Bento as a pup uploaded!  Yay me!  (my slow, non-tech savvy ass)

Here Comes Bento! (2) from Kelly Lee on Vimeo.

Just a video today

When Bento was a tiny little pup (yes, in ye olden days before we had digital cameras.  But this is we as in my immediate family though.  Not we as in my Uncle Linus, who is always on the cutting edge of technology and was the first of us to have a smartphone, a tablet, and a digital camera.  I'm pretty sure I was still using my ghetto Motorola Razr at the time) I did not have the good fortune to have a means of recording every second of his blessed puppyhood.  But thank the Lord, yes, praise hallelujah that my Uncle Linus had the foresight to take digital video of my Bento as a little 2 pound puppy and SET IT TO MUSIC for us.  He actually made this DVD for us many moons ago, but it had gotten lost in the shuffle.  As Bento got sick, I dug through ALL of our crap in our media cabinet (and it was a lot) and managed to unearth this DVD from 2002. Then I had to go online and google the crap out of how to save it onto a computer and convert it to streaming format.  Oy vey.

However, all of that has been done, so Mr. Bento's little documented puppyhood can how be shared with the world. And by world I mean my mom, who is the only one who reads this (hi mom!) and maybe my brother (hi Raymond!).

I usually upload all my Bento goodness (okay, so it may only be goodness to me) to the wonders of youtube, but since there's copyrighted music that Linus inserted in the soundtrack, youtube freaking muted it and you don't get to hear his cute little yips and barks.  Which just sucks.  Who wants to watch a muted video???

Here is Mr. Bento in all his puppyfied glory:

Here Comes Bento! (1) from Kelly Lee on Vimeo.

We've been blessed

It was a little over two weeks ago we received the news that my Mr. Bento has kidney failure and has a maximum life expectancy of two weeks...if we brought him to the hospital each day to be hooked up onto an IV drip to replenish his poor dehydrated little body.  That was on Thursday, May 29.  Today is Saturday, June 14th.

These last two weeks have given us the time we needed to absorb the reality that my Bento is nearing the end of his life with us.  It's given us two weeks to prepare ourselves and to say goodbye to him.  It's given each of us time with him to coddle him, spoil him and tell him how much we love him.  It's given us the time we really needed to come to terms with our reality and to make our peace with it.

The bright side to all this?  To getting news of Bento's imminent demise?  We've appreciated each and every minute of time we have left with him.  After the initial shock and deluge of emotions where we couldn't stop sobbing like a bunch of weenies, there hasn't been much crying the last two weeks.  Oh, there was mad ass crazy crying the first 3 days or so, but we calmed down and carried on relatively normally.  How normally?  Well, Bento would always be tired and lethargic during the day, but he seemed to pick up some energy in the late afternoon and early evenings.  While I'm at work, my mom would feed him congee or porridge through a little syringe, but in the evenings when I'd get home, he'd request food and eat out of his little bowl.   Of course, the fact that he's been sick doesn't negate the fact that he's the pickiest eater in the world, so in an effort to please him and stimulate his appetite, we've been changing up his food every.  single.  day.  Yup.  We are clearly crazy.  We got Hawaiian food, we got chicken from this Chinese take out place he loves (we freaking drove 25 minutes to buy this chicken for him), spare ribs from the dim sum place he likes, oxtail soup because he's always liked that.  We baked chicken legs (he only eats dark meat. Drumsticks if you want to be specific), sauteed chicken legs, steamed chicken legs.  Every day we try to figure out what he'd want to eat - because he never wants to eat the same thing two days in a row.  Oy vey.

 For almost two weeks, it seemed like he was improving every day - each day he would do something "old" that he he hadn't done in a long time.  We'd cheer for each little thing like Bento had conquered the world.  Something as simple as peeing with one leg up - he hadn't done that in a long, long time.  I guess because he was feeling nauseous for a while and had bad balance - when we saw him raise his leg to pee into my mom's rosebushes, we clapped for him like he'd accomplished a great feat.  When he scratched his ear with his hind leg, we cheered as well because he hadn't done that in awhile.  The first time (yes first.  He did it more than once) he stood on his hind legs to ask for something, I wanted to cry I was so happy.  We took him for walks everyday as well - in the beginning he'd just lay there and you'd see his little brow move - that's how we knew he wasn't asleep.  Day by day he'd grow more and more animated - and it was so weird.  Wasn't he suppose to be getting worse?  How come he seems to be getting better?  Of course we understand he's not going to be healed - his anti-nausea meds and the hydration therapy we've got him on are what's contributed to his improvement.  His appetite, energy, and responsiveness all improved each day.  I say this in the past tense because these last two days he hasn't shown much of an appetite and he's been very lethargic.  He'll still walk a bit to pee and he doesn't fall over anymore - but when I pick him up, it's like he's boneless, he's so lethargic.  Of course, when we took him to the dentists office today (for my mom, not for him) he grew animated and barked a couple times and almost jauntily pranced over - but he's been more lethargic and slower than he had been the last week or so,

Initially we were on high alert "Bento watch".  Seriously, we all bunked down together for almost a week to ensure his every need was met in the middle of the night - whether it be water or he needed to pee.  My mom's a light sleeper, so every time he'd move, she'd wake him and see if she needed to take him out - be it midnight or 4 in the morning.  

our living room, turned into a big ass slumber party setting

Bento enjoys sleeping on cushy down comforters

As we saw him improve, we started sleeping in our own bedrooms again - but Bento would usually stay with my mom since she's the lightest sleeper out of all of us.  We try to feed him 35 ml of water every hour since he's dehydrated - but we cut that down after 10:30 pm so he doesn't have to pee the entire night and he could actually get some sleep.  Our routine now is to take him out between midnight to 1 am and then take him out again at six the next morning - with us cutting down on his water, he's lasted the entire night this last week without needing to pee every two hours.  

Another thing we've done is his hydration therapy.  It's $35 a session at the vet's office - but they told us we could do it at home ourselves.  He can only do it every other day and it's 100 ml of water each time.  He can't do more because his heart (he has heart disease too.  Poor Bento) can't take any more than that.  But this is suppose to help him feel better since he's severely dehydrated.  It's not as good as an IV, but it creates a water pocket under his skin that slowly absorbs into his body, alleviating the effects of dehydration.  When we went to the vet's office on 5/31, it was just my mom and I.  The vet tech came in to show us how to do it and my mom refused to be the one who stuck Bento with the BIG ASS NEEDLE.  So I'm the evil one who has to stick him with the big ass needle every other day.   I'm used to it now, even though I still get a rock in my gut when it's time - I always feel bad for poor Bento who knows what's coming.  He was crying a few days ago when we did it and it made us feel so bad.  But the three of us (yes, it takes three) are just as nervous and scared - the first time I had to do it at home my hands were shaking and I was sweating like a stuck pig.  We still say a prayer together every time we do it.  But we put him on an ottoman, then have my dad stand on a chair way high up and hold the saline bag - he's in charge of holding the bag and checking to make sure we've given him the 100 ml of saline.  My mom is at his head holding him (dogs have been known to bite during hydration therapy) and trying to distract him while I'm the evil bitch behind him sticking him with a ginormous needle.  We initially tried hooking the saline bag to my chandelier, but we noticed that it wasn't as high as we needed and it kinked the lines a little bit so the drip was significantly slower, so my dad's the one who holds the bag now.  While standing on a chair. My poor dad.

almost full saline bag (over a week ago) hooked up ready to be dispensed

do you see the size of this needle?  It's not focused, but it's GINORMOUS!

With help from his hydration therapy and his anti-nausea meds, we had a brief period where sometimes we'd almost forget that he's sick.

Like at dinner at my place - we always eat at the kitchen island and Bento usually comes and sits under us during dinner.  He hasn't done this in a long time because he's been feeling so poorly - but earlier this week he toddled over and laid down under our feet like he did back in the day!

And he'd been feeling so well he started asking for food!

his "I want something to eat please!" face

He felt well enough to want to go out for a walk every day.  Okay, so by walk I really mean I'm walking and pushing him around on a stroller - whatever.  But he got out and wandered around on the grass at the park for awhile!

his "my ride is awesome" face

And he would hang out around the house instead of just sleeping.   He watched some MLB with dad:

Hung out with all his little friends (toys.  Do you see how many he has?  This isn't even HALF.  Maybe a third?)

He even felt well enough for me to harass him.  And to nap with him

And he's chill enough to hang out in the backyard:

And play around on the carpet as well - something we also haven't seen in a long time:

Friday morning (yesterday) he woke up more lethargic than usual.  Which was horribly sad and disappointing because he'd been so excited on his walk the night before he wasn't laying down - he was up - he sat up to take in the sights, also something he hasn't done in a long time.  He didn't have much of an appetite last night - we fed him some chicken mom cooked and he only wanted the cartilage.  So of course we made him eat more porridge out of his syringe.  He eats about 3 tubes a day, which is about 3/8th of a cup.  Today's the same way - he didn't want anything else to eat, he ate a teeny tiny portion of chicken cartilage from the drumstick we gave him so we fed him 2 syringes full of porridge.  I also have a high calorie supplement that looks and smells like condensed milk that I'll mix with water so he gets some nutrients and calories when I feed him that as well.  

Thus far he's exceeded both ours and the vet's expectations.  Not only has he surpassed the two weeks the vet gave him (without, I note, spending 8 hours in a place he finds horrific and dreadful each day), but he's spent the last two weeks able to have some fun, eat some good food, and have some good times with his family.  There's not much more one can ask for.