Kayme's Dixie Lou

Well John and I have an eventful past couple of weeks. We realized about ten days ago that our oldest dog, Dixie Lou, had come down with a cough. Her coughing started to keep us up at night, so John took her to the vet the next day. We discovered that she had congestive heart failure and heartworms. This was not good news. We had to take our others in the next day to see if they had heartworms. This was one of our worst nights so far because our dogs have become one of our biggest loves in our lives. Well the results came back that our others were fine, but we still had to treat Dixie.

We treated Dixie for the cough first and she perked back up and went back to her old self. We traveled that weekend to Odessa for John's mom and dad's gun show that they promote and the dogs did just fine with the trip. Dixie continued to improve until this past week when they got out of the yard for the night. We found Blou and General the next morning, but Dixie was no where to be found. I finally got a call from our realtor at my old house telling me that a lady had found her and was going to leave her in the backyard.

I dashed over there to get her and discovered that she had taken a turn for the worse. She was having trouble walking and it was painful to be picked up. I carried her home and we continued to watch her for a couple of days, but things just didn't get better.

Friday, John and I had planned to head to Lubbock to help his parents with the gun show up there and the dogs were going. By this point we new Dixie was not going to be able to make the trip and we were continuing to let her suffer. So John made the call to the vet and took her in to have her put down. He called me and told me not to come home unless I was able to handle it, so I waited a while before going home.

We are now down to two dogs and hopefully that will remain our number for now. We are still adjusting to only having two dogs and Blou and General are making use of all three dog beds.

Here is a picture of Dixie (she is the one sitting in the middle of the blanket).