She was living high on the hog since her diagnosis. I bet she consumed more calories in a day that most of my friends in the same timeframe. We pulled out all the stops. One day, Eazy's work bought a 'sack' of Egg McMuffins for a class on not spitting on children, and she came home with like 6 of them. Pardon me, they were Sausage McMuffins (the cousin). Every day for a week, I'd tear up one and throw its pieces on the back patio for M to find and eat. Add to that about a hundred pounds a week of restaurant leftovers and you can just see her teasing other dogs at the park about how their lives suck it.
Yesterday, Melissa came home from work and Maxine didn't come into the house for her usual obnoxious greeting, nor did she get all wiggly for her walk around the lake. Elissa called me in tears, so I rushed home to find M keeping the weight off her tumor-side leg and not able to run more than a few steps before returning to a subtle limp. We made an appointment for the vet, fake-hoping that there's something they could do.
This morning, I tried feeding her half a sausage and she couldn't slink through the dog door because of the weakness in her leg. I knew she wouldn't make it to the end of the day, and Eazy had plans to head out of town for a family funeral. So I didn't say anything to Elissa, and, after getting off work early, found M in the same sad state.
Anyway, to cut to the chase, we brought M in at 3:30. We waited for a while for the doc. Maxine's whole thorax was full of fluid, and her x-ray from the last visit is a legend at the office. Her heart was beating visibly, on the opposite side of her body from where it belonged because of the size of the tumor. They gave her a sedative and I ran through her favorite routines ('pick which hand has the treat', "Where's Donnie Chubb?", the high five, "Gertie Gertie Gertie", and some others) as it set in, to keep her tail-stump wiggling. Then the vet came back in and, having no luck on veins in both her back legs, shot some poison into her front leg and she was dead, right in front of us with her last high-five still in my hand, in about another 90 seconds.
It was sad as hell, I have a derivative of diaper rash around my eyes and nose from crying so much. At the end, I said something like "Now we have a dead dog, this sucks. Let's split.", and me and Melissa headed home in silence. I folded my clean laundry and we started joking about how I'm going to get a bloodhound while Elissa is out with her family. We talked later about how we both independently secretly thought it would have been fun to have pictures of Maxine and Killer Graham before she kicked it, but that won't happen. My little black bird is just a funny story now.
Long Live the M. If you're bored and have some time to kill, read this.
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