Yeah, thanks for asking. It’s been a bit tough, though, for a lot of reasons. Hard to really describe but it’s kind of a coalescence of many different things. As a kid we had a dog as well as a couple cats and remember them dying. Our dog was like 14 and died while I was out in Ohio on a mission, and I was expecting that. Anyway, I’d always been against the idea of getting an animal because of knowing it’s pretty temporary and knowing you’ll deal with their death within ten years or so, so I had resisted the idea for quite a while. I was ready to get a dog but hadn’t verbalized that to my wife, but was waiting until we ended up moving to Texas when we’d then own our own house, so we got a dog after being there for 4 or so months. We only had two kids at the time and I was on call a lot and working overnight, so it made my wife feel better. We had a Doberman for 9 months, too, but when we had our third kid we weren’t able to devote enough time to his high energy needs so we re-homed him (the Doberman) and that was really hard. My oldest son took it really hard (I think he was 6 at the time) and I remember a couple days later I saw a drawing on the porch he did in sidewalk chalk of the dog and that was tough. In a way I felt like I really failed him. Anyway, fast forward to now, and our dog had been with us longer than we’ve had our three youngest kids, and my second oldest was just barely 3 when we got him, so he’s never really known anything else and he seems to be really struggling. As for me, though I’m not a vet, I am a physician and should have or did know better and should have done something sooner. One thing separate from this is my frustration with how little we really understand about medical science and how much that varies from the public perception of medicine, and I think the farther along I went with my training the more scientifically agnostic I have become, because there often times aren’t answers to certain questions out there, yet as humans we demand certain answers, so we often accept answers that aren’t true or are purely hypothetical because it satisfies that psychological need. The way this relates to me is that I’m much more patient with things and not in a panic, as we too often overreact. So constantly I’m fielding questions from family or my wife about if we need to take someone in for something, of which I’m usually pumping the brakes. I’m clearly not a vet, but my wife would ask if we need to take him in, and it was a legit consideration, but I was giving him a bit of time. My oldest, who’s very anxious, had asked about it a few times, and the morning he died was googling “dog dying symptoms” because he was getting worried. So this is hard, because my son always has a lot of anxiety and we’re constantly reassuring him, yet here I feel like I’ve totally failed him. I’m not saying that in hindsight. There’s enough there that I should have seen to go in a day or two earlier. Who knows what would have happened, but I can’t imagine what that will do to his perspective and his anxiety over time when he catastrophizes and feels like, when it really matters, he’s powerless, and that nobody is listening.
