Today’s strip is a rerun. I apologize for that, but I’m just not up to drawing anything for today. The following is going to be a lot of heart-on-the-sleeve stuff, so I won’t be offended if you stop reading here.
Yesterday (Thursday) I took my dog, Buddy (the inspiration for T-Bone) to the vet. He’d been feeling bad on and off for awhile. He had been lying still for the previous 24 hours, and Thursday morning he vomited and defecated on the floor. (And he NEVER shit on the floor. If we were gone for a while, he’d wait patiently until we got back. Sometimes he go right to the back door as soon as we got home, but he wouldn’t “go” inside.) I also noticed that his belly seemed to be getting a little distended, so I took a day off to take him to the vet.
So, at the vet, they took some x-rays and found that he had fluid in his abdomen. The vet “tapped” his belly (withdrew fluid with a syringe) to see what kind of fluid was building up. After she withdrew the needle, she showed me the syringe.
It was filled with blood.
The vet told me Buddy’s condition had gone from “serious” to “critical” and told me to take him to an animal hospital that could do surgery if needed.
So I loaded Buddy into my truck, drove to the hospital, and was told that most likely the bleeding was caused by a tumor. They could operate, but if it WAS a tumor, he probably had only 3 months left. And that’s with chemotherapy.
So, I went to talk to my wife (who works at a hospital not too far from the animal hospital) and we made the decision to put Buddy to sleep. (That’s the old fashioned way of putting it. Nowadays, they usually say “putting him down”)
I’m just not able to do a strip today, what with the crying and heavy drinking, so I’m putting up a repeat strip that most reminds me of Buddy. He was blind the last few years of his life, and had become an indoor dog, but before that, he would kill pretty much any critter that made the mistake of wandering into our back yard. I’m not sure just how many times this happened because I stopped counting at 20.
Buddy was a loyal, loving dog and I’m going to miss him very, very much…
