Cancer unexpectedly took Lucy before old age could finish her

By David McElroy · November 2, 2025

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.

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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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