Cancer unexpectedly took Lucy before old age could finish her

In the end, it was cancer that took Lucy from me.

I don’t want to talk about this, but I can’t help but tell the story. I can’t speak the words without breaking down, so I’ve told nobody so far. I’ve already given you the big picture view of losing her very early this morning, but here’s how the last day of her precious life really went.

I had known for months that Lucy was declining, so I’d been preparing myself. She didn’t have any symptoms of anything wrong out of the ordinary, but I’ve been through enough death with dogs and cats to recognize when the end is approaching.

Each time I returned home from work this past week, I feared that I would find her dead. I had the same fears about her each morning when I woke up. I knew it was that close. I knew it was inevitable.

I was surprised when she made it to another weekend, but I was overjoyed to have a little more time with her. When Saturday started, though, I had no idea how much would change by the time my long day would end Sunday morning.

Lucy still wanted to be near wherever I was in the house Saturday. She was dragging herself to whichever room I would go. I was able to get a few last photos of her, including one with her trademark “smile.” Mostly, though, I talked to her, because listening to me tell her what a wonderful girl she was always made her tail wag. It seemed to make her happy.

She had stopped eating last weekend, but I had continued to offer food to her each day. She had shown no interest all week.

Around 3:30 p.m., something seemingly miraculous happened. She wanted to eat. I gave her a 5.5-ounce can of food and she gobbled it down. I gave her another and she quickly ate it. She was enjoying herself.

I was afraid that she shouldn’t have too much — since she hadn’t eaten for a week — so I waited about an hour between giving her more. She was eating each bit of food like a hungry girl who was just discovering food.

But something changed about 10:30 p.m.

When I gave her the sixth can of food I had offered to her, she not only struggled to stand to eat it — but she yelped in pain. Something was causing intense pain for her, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

By this point, I had allowed myself to have some hope that she might be getting better and that she might even get back to normal for awhile. But when I heard her cries of pain, I knew I had to get immediate help.

Her two front legs looked swollen. One of her legs even seemed to bend at an odd angle near her paw. Could she have hurt herself somehow and this was the cause of the pain? That was the best narrative I could come up with.

I had planned to take her to my regular vet Monday if she was still alive, but the pain had changed everything. We couldn’t wait. It was time for a trip to an emergency vet clinic.

I carried her to the car and gently placed her into the back seat on a towel. As we drove, I talked to her the entire way. She has always loved riding in cars, but she wasn’t accustomed to this sort of ride.

By the time we arrived at the emergency clinic, I had trouble talking to the person at the front desk. I was too emotional. I was full of fear of losing her and hope that we might still save her. So I struggled to talk as I struggled to control my tears.

When the clinic brought a stretcher out for her, I lifted her from the back seat to move her onto the stretcher. She gave a little yelp of pain. As I lifted her, I felt something on her underside that I hadn’t felt before. It was a hard mass inside her body — one that shouldn’t be there. She had lost enough weight that something that had been hidden was obvious. I hadn’t been looking for it. My hand just happened to touch that spot.

The wait was excruciating while the vet examined Lucy. When the vet finally came to talk to me, she looked somber. I thought I knew where this conversation was headed.

The vet admitted that she thought it was cancer, but she said the only way to be sure was to do a biopsy. Even without that, though, blood work and X-rays could tell us with a high degree of confidence. She said that given Lucy’s age and condition, we could give up now or we could do the blood work and X-rays.

I told the vet that she was probably right, but that if I didn’t have the tests done, I would never be able to be sure I had tried everything. She understood and the plan was set. If the tests showed what we feared, it would be time to let her go. If there was any doubt, she would give me pain medication and I would go to my regular vet on Monday for another opinion.

It was well after midnight when the vet returned with the test results. Her white blood cell count was off the chart — literally. The vet said that an elevated white blood cell count could normally indicate an infection, but it was high enough in this case that it was pretty much always an expression of the body’s effort to fight cancer.

Then we talked about the X-rays.

The upper part of her backbone was normal and the lower part was normal, too. The middle section, though, looked “as if moths had been eating on it,” in her words. And this was a death sentence all by itself.

The vet believes that the main abnormal mass was from her mammary glands, meaning that we could call it breast cancer in a human. She believes that the cancer was metastasizing to other parts of her body — including some bones.

The cancer had apparently attacked her backbone already. There was also another mass on the upper part of one of her front legs. The vet said the backbone was now very brittle and could break at any time.

It would have been completely irresponsible to bring her home and take any more chances with her at this point. I had to let my beautiful girl go.

The vet said I didn’t have to stay for the end, but I couldn’t imagine bringing Lucy this far and then abandoning her just before the finish line. I had to stay with her.

I was rubbing her head and talking to her at the very end. I was telling her everything was OK and she was going to go to sleep now. I told her how much I loved her and I thanked her for being such a good girl. She was listening to my voice as I talked — and her tail was gently wagging against the stretcher as she took her last breaths.

I went to the parking lot and sat in my car. I broke down and cried hard.

When I stopped crying, I opened my MacBook and wrote a brief article about her death. I published that and shared it to Facebook and Instagram.

Then I drove home in silence — to a house that already felt empty without Lucy waiting for me at the front door.