Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Part Nine: The Turn For The Worse & Some of the Hardest Talks In My Life

Post First Originally Published On Tuesday, July 9th, 2013, 7:07 PM 


It’s 8:49 pm, Saturday, June 29th, 2013 as I type this. I’m sitting outside in the backyard, taking the first of steps to regaining track of writing about all the things I want to write about. I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by all the myriad of interesting topics that fascinate me, but because of many different excuses, at the end of the day, procrastination is paying a heavy price on my well being. There have been many occasions where I decided I was going to quit writing for this blog, because I feel so overwhelmed by falling behind. It all just keeps building up, so I need to catch up now, then limit the exposure I get and focus one by one until each one is done. Continuing with what happened to my much loved dog, Lucky.

My mom understood. Normally if we told her we were going for a walk at night, she would poke and prod, wanting to know about the where and why. The garage door closed and we began walking down the route that we walked Lucky countless times in the years that we had her. Neither of us said anything. I took in a deep breath of air and controllably, let it out. Didn’t know how to start. I thought back to a walk we had freshman year of college, while walking Lucky. My brother had just found out about Dolores Cannon’s work. I knew at that moment that her work would come back one day to really console me, to help me through a tough time. I told my brother, “You know I always knew Dolores Cannon’s work would play a crucial role in our lives one day.” We delicately talked about the assessment of the situation, being very careful in our word choice. “I don’t want to admit it, but if the situation doesn’t improve, we’re not going to have a choice but to send her back home.” I proceeded to tell my brother about what I had learned from my regression with Susan, omitting very personal details. I told him generally what the regression was like, reasons I believe it from a personal standpoint, what I was doing here on earth, and why this was happening. This led to us talking about the independent fields of sciences that are proving what Dolores Cannon has found in her work, along with many other past life regressionists as well. We talked about our perspectives of how we should view the physical “death” of the body. We must have easily talked for more than an hour. We came away from that talk, bolstered in our spiritual beliefs and as ready as we could have been in carrying out what soon enough, needed to be done. We certainly did not want to do it, but knew that it very likely will need to be done. We needed to talk to our mom and sister about what we were thinking. It wasn’t going to be easy broaching the topic, and my brother and I both needed to be the anchors in our beliefs here to be the calm in the storm and lead the family through this difficult time.

We drove to a parking lot outside a movie theater that I frequent on and off. We talked inside the car. My brother spearheaded the conversation. My sister cried, but surprisingly understood what we were saying and understood our conviction of the other side. Through recanting much of the similar conversation that I had with my brother, but now with my mom and sister as well, they understood that if the situation did not improve, we needed to send Lucky back “home”. Of course the execution of how, when, and where it would be done was still not unanimous between us. There was no way I was willing to force Lucky against her will in this state to the veterinary clinic to euthanize her. Just no way in hell. If it needed to be done, I wanted it to be done in as peaceful and calm manner as possible. I did not her to know that something was wrong. So for this reason as well, I did not want any of us to be crying in front of her. And I have no doubt that if any of the four of us were there when it would happen, we would lose it in a chain reaction. For this reasoning, I strongly argued against bringing her to a vet clinic to get the job done as well as being present when it would happen. This point is possibly, highly controversial. Thoughts of, “how could you leave your beloved one alone when they do it?!” “How could you abandon her when it’s your last moments seeing her?” “Have the courage to be there when the end comes!” All these thoughts come to mind. Well, I will address that in a future write. My mom voiced her concern over putting an animal to sleep inside the home. She preferred, if it had to be done, it be done outside, which I agreed to but at the same time, knew that if Lucky did not go outside by herself, we may not have a choice.

Friday morning came, after a sleepless night on the living room’s couches. In the early morning, probably around 6:30 AM, my brother and I were awakened to Lucky wining. Lucky was laying on her blue circular mattress/bed. We decided to do what we did the past night, which gave us a small success. We had carried her bed, with her on it, next to the lawn in the backyard, and by sliding a towel underneath her, helped stabilize her somewhat while she could urinate to the best of her abilities. She got some urine out last night. So we hoisted her bed next to the lawn again. Typing this after 6 months, my recollection of this is decently fuzzy. I believe it was to no avail. We sighed. My brother took out his phone and began snapping pictures. I didn’t even think of doing that, but now I followed suit. I hate to admit it, but it was depressing. Taking those pictures. From what I remember, we tried the towel method again later around 10 or 11 in the morning. This time, we got a small victory that would buy us some more time. I guess she reached that threshold where she just had to, had to go! Once I had the towel stabilizing her hind body weight, to the best of my abilities, and I noticing her beginning to urinate, I just damn told myself, “Flex that back Michael and keep in straight just like when you do those heavy deadlifts sets every week! Hold it up there all the way!” I was relieved to see her urinate. After peeing for a span of seconds which felt like a whole minute, I was ecstatic to see if she could walk, and just hoped to God that she could. She took a few steps, then stumbled to our backyard concrete as safely as she could. I wasn’t sure how I should have felt. I felt relieved, yet disappointed at the same time. I wished she would have walked normally again. From the few steps that I saw her take, I hated to admit it, but her legs looked shaky and unstable. It seemed to be a balance problem, not a muscle related problem. My brother had told me a suspected culprit of her sudden gait disturbance Thursday night. Artemisinen, is what it’s called. It’s one of the new modalities we were going to give her that had arrived a couple weeks later than when it was supposed to arrive. He read prior to purchasing it online that in high toxicity overdosage, it can cause permanent gait disturbances. My brother will soon coin this artemisinen, as “a method the other side used to send her back home”. But at the time, I hoped the artemisimen was weaning off and her three-legged gait would go back to its “normal”.  

I have no real recollection of the rest of Friday and next day, Saturday, to be honest. I don’t know if I had subconsciously repressed it or for some other reason, but no significant memory comes to mind after that. I guess it’s because there was no added, volatile increase in stress to the already overwhelming level of stress I had been feeling in those days since I learned of her diagnosis and her recent turn for the worse. My memory of Sunday, December 30th, 2012, though, are clear to me. This date, is just a date on the calendar, but important to me in my life for what happened and in a symbolic way as well.

The last time she urinated was Friday morning. She had not gone in almost two days. In terms of defecation, she was having mild diarrhea and she would defecate on herself. It was tough and heart-wrenching to see her deteriorate like that, but at least she was getting it out, I reasoned to myself, which obviously could not be said for her bladder. Her gait did not improve as she was still laying there all day. I had looked into getting a dog wheelchair, thinking that if I could get her to use the wheelchair for her back legs, she could still get around and go to the bathroom. The last night, she was wining, and I had also looked up videos to try and manually express her bladder. I don’t know if I did it right but it didn’t work. Saturday night, we were doing the same procedure, carrying her on her mattress next to the backyard lawn, and sliding the towel between her belly near her hind legs so I could lift and help stabilize to hopefully help her void her the bladder. But Lucky seemed to dislike the towel in that area when I would try and lift her hind up. I really wanted her to just put up with the towel so she could go, but she would begin to growl. Things were just not going our way for potential solutions I would think of.


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