Goodbye Zeus

Goodbye old friend

March 25th 2002 - February 12th 2012

February 12th 2012 - we were going out for our afternoon walk. I hadn't planned to go out in the car, just a local walk would've been fine, but as we left the house Zeus gave me one of his intense stares... "Ah OK, we'll go to the woods". The woods were his favourite place, did he know it was his last chance to go there? I think he did.

Zeus ran around the woods energetically, enjoying his time there as always. He seemed fine, big smiley face - he loved his walks so much. A few hours later he was gone forever.

At about 8pm that day Zeus refused a banana, his favourite food in the world. The only other time he had done so was when he had a sore tummy from a blockage so I gently felt his abdomen and straight away called the emergency vet as he was starting to bloat.

I got him to the vets within ten minutes and he was x-rayed straight away. The x-ray confirmed his intestine had twisted. The vet, she was lovely, gave me the option of letting him go straight away or operating to release the gas and untwist his stomach. I had to try, I couldn't just let him go without giving him the best chance possible.

The surgery itself was a success, but the cause of his bloat turned out to be a massively enlarged spleen which the vet thought was caused by tumours. She said we could try to remove the spleen but strongly recommended against doing so as she didn't think it would be best for him... there really was no decision to make, I had to let him go.

The last thing Zeus remembered was going to sleep.

Pushed from pillar to post for the first fourteen months of his life, I was home number six. I promised him he wouldn't be moved on again and he wasn't.

My old vet said Zeus would be crippled by the time he was four, Wobblers disease they said. "Don't let him run around or it will progress faster - keep him as quiet as you can to keep him happy". I didn't listen to them because I figured he had suffered enough and deserved to run around and be happy. Rest? Zeus? No chance! We walked for hours at a time, went for bike rides for miles at a time - he loved to run and he thrived on it. Yes he did slow down in his later years but he always loved to run. On his final run at the woods I said he would be running around until the day he died, I didn't know it would be that day but I was right. He ran and ran and ran with no sign of the disease that was supposedly going to cripple him by the age of four.

Today would have been his tenth birthday, and here I am writing a memorial...

Goodbye Zeus

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