Now we are down to nine.

Back on the 18th January we had a scare in that we lost Hazel for a few hours; I wrote about that here.  The reason that comes to mind so clearly is that on the 19th we took our dog, Phoebe, down to see a specialist vet in Phoenix.

Phoebe had been showing signs of blood in her stools but otherwise was a fit and happy dog and still eating well.  Our local vet thought that a colonoscopy might throw some better light on the problem.  In fact, the specialist in Phoenix rapidly identified swollen lymph glands, gave Phoebe a scan and diagnosed lymphoma.  It was a bombshell, more so as the specialist didn’t give Phoebe’s chances at much more than 7 to 10 days.

One of the recommendations from the specialist was to put Phoebe immediately on a grain-free diet and we have subsequently learnt the dangers of many grain-based dog foods.  We declined chemotherapy as her liver had already been compromised.

The change of diet plus boundless love and attention extended Phoebe’s life until yesterday morning when, around 3.15 am she had a seizure and entered a coma.  By 7.30 am Phoebe was very weak and not registering the world around her.  But she wasn’t in pain, and to the best of our knowledge, had not experienced pain during her last journey.

Sometime around 9am Phoebe slipped away and Jean and I buried her a little later.  She lies in peace, under the shade of a tall Ponderosa pine.

Phoebe was such a sweet, loving dog.  Jean found her back in the Summer of 2004 when Jean was living, with her late husband Ben, in the coastal Mexican town of San Carlos.  Jean had been running a dog rescue operation for years just out of her love for dogs.

Jean came across this young, female dog, about 4 months old, running through the village of Santa Clara about 12 miles from San Carlos.  The dog was really thin and didn’t seem to belong to anyone so Jean brought her back to San Carlos and placed her in the lot where she looked after her rescue dogs while they were waiting for adoption by caring humans.  Jean found that this little black dog was totally friendly and loving to all.  But within a few weeks some of the bigger dogs in the lot started to pick on her and, Phoebe, as she was now known was taken back to Jean’s house and that was that.

And a final footnote.

Back to Phoebe’s seizure around 3am on Thursday morning.  Something woke me around 3.10am and I rolled out of the bed to make tracks for the bathroom.  Pharaoh sleeps on his blanket just inside the door to the bedroom and is always dead to the world until 7am, give or take.

But not yesterday morning.  He was sitting on his haunches, facing the closed door and totally alert.  He knew something was wrong in the room where Phoebe was, despite there being no sound at all.  Jean and I like to think that the last message that Phoebe sent out to her world was heard by Pharaoh.