Eva's Past, Present and Future

Friday was a particularly long day that began with a lot of hope, and ended with a lot of discouragement.  Exhausted from it all, I went to bed early.

I'll begin this post by telling you the rest of the story about our girl that you know as "Eevah, or Evah."  Because of where she came from, and how I got her, I felt strongly that I needed to protect her from her past. But on Friday, that past caught up with her. And I feel like it's time to share that past with all of you.  Eva (the actual spelling of her name) came from a commercial kennel here in Virginia.  The dogs at this kennel (puppy mill) are kept, bred and are exploited purely for profit.  Students at a nearby college consider it a "fun afternoon" to go there, pay a $5 donation to get to play with the Golden Retriever puppies and walk the parents.  "Commercial Kennel" advertises doing this, and a friend of mine has a daughter who attends this college, and she has gone there many times with her friends.  Eva was even part of their advertising as were her puppies. The $5 donation supposedly goes to "charity" but there is little doubt, at least in my mind, about where that money is actually going.  Commercial Kennel, with their carefully kept records, operates within the law and despite how you or I may feel about it, it's a legal business. Unfortunately.

I don't really want to dwell on Eva's past.  But that past of her having puppies twice a year for about 7 years, now appears to be affecting her future health that we will all agree is of course the top priority.  As you know, I took Eva on Friday for an ultrasound to see if a spay surgery had been done when her last litter of puppies were delivered via c-section in October. The results were that Eva is still able to have puppies. The other not-so-good-news is that there is not going to be anything that we can do to change that.

Tests we've been doing on Eva show a protein loss in her urine and high blood pressure.  Tying it all back to the ultrasound which showed that her kidney's have abnormalities in their appearance.  The diagnosis is Chronic Kidney disease.  Eva being put under anesthetic could cause renal failure, so it makes doing a spay surgery, too risky.

It's possible that her kidney's may have been an issue for awhile, and Commercial Kennel probably never had any kind of blood work done to have known that.  It's also possible that the anesthetic from the c-section that Eva had in October could have been the culprit for the current condition of her kidney's. It's impossible to know for sure.

The plan is to put Eva on medication (enalapril) with the hopes that it will help with the protein loss, and high blood pressure. Eva will be 8 years old in a few weeks. This disease usually affects dogs a few years older than she is and progresses slowly.  So, our goal will be to try and slow it down, with medications and diet.

There are few words to say how sad and disappointed I am that Eva's life is going to be shortened by this disease.  It's a truly helpless feeling.

But if there's anything I have learned in living with dogs, is that they live in the present. They don't drag their history with them into the present moment and they don't project their worries into the future.  They leave that to us!  They're happy doing what they do, wagging their tails and never missing the chance to enjoy life.  As you can see in the video below that I made at the start of the year of Eva, she's no exception.

At times like this, I need to remember and hang onto this lesson. And do it - For Eva.