Canidae

Hi! I'm Rue, age 22, attending nursing school in New York. I am described as "that dog girl" by a lot of people, though I have equally large portions of my life given to medicine, horses, birds and music. The dog love must stand out the most, I guess!

Currently I'm not in a living situation where I can have a dog; my boyfriend and I make too little money and live in a pet-free complex. Someday I hope I will be the kind of person who is home enough to have a dog again. The love of my life, Flash, a GSD mix, died in 2005 of lymphosarcoma at the too-young age of eight.

(He didn't even live long enough to develop the hip dysplasia we were waiting for. Blessing in a curse, I guess, because of how much he loved to run.)

It kind of hurts me to talk about him sometimes, and the time with him was before my family had a digital camera -- plus, he was afraid of cameras -- so I have no pictures to show. :( But this icon is extremely close to how he looked. The circumstances of his death were horrible; he went through a course of chemotherapy, recovered and his rabies vac caused a recurrence. Chemo was torture for him and nobody could bear to put him through it again; the worst moment of my life by far has been when I was forced to make an appointment to have him euthanized. Either that or the walk I took him on the night before the morning I knew he was to die, even if he didn't.

But I don't want to dwell on his death. So a little about his life: he was a rescue. A trucker found him tied to a tree on the side of a highway, all skin and bones and took him to the humane society, where he lived for a year. He was Pet of the Week in the local paper. Someone adopted him, took him back. We adopted him later (not having known about Pet of the Week, actually) thanks to what I was convinced was the 'magic dog book'; I brought it home from the library one day when I was just-turned-nine and my mom got me a dog that very day! Because she and my dad had been secretly looking at dogs that very morning. She told me they narrowed it down to two and of the two I picked Flash. That day. Because my mom felt guilty. She didn't ... tell my dad. Surprise new dog! He took it well because he grew up with dogs. We were lucky, there. Found out why he got taken back when we had him taken in to get neutered to find that he had undescended testes and the neutering was going to cost $425 instead of $40.

It kind of went like this:
VET: *calls* Do you want us to go ahead with the rest of the surgery or would you like to have him sewn up?
MY DAD: Are you crazy?
VET: People have refused to do this before and left the dog intact, but it could cause testicular cancer or --
MY DAD: Neuter the dog, ma'am.

My dad is kind of awesome. My parents also coughed up $11,000 (yes that is the correct number of zeros) to treat his cancer when he got it instead of just putting him down, because I was in high school and -- my parents loved this dog. My parents also won't talk about him because they're bad grievers, but I know that I need to talk about him to remember him right.

He had a hard beginning, but he had a great, if painfully short, life being my psychiatric service dog once we finished training. We went everywhere together. As a full-size GSD mix with a severely underweight nine-year-old, he was bigger than me. This makes for a great psychiatric animal, seriously. I grew into him but he was basically always even with me in weight -- I never reached any taller than 5'.

Due to his background of being abused for most of his early life (he was missing teeth & toes and our vet told us he showed signs of being beaten as a puppy; no doubts on my part) he never really learned how to "play" like a normal dog. His version of fetch was to catch the ball when you threw it, chew on it for a little while and then walk away, assuming eventually you would throw it again. He liked his chew toys but got frighteningly aggressive sometimes during a tug-of-war because of how his food likely got taken away from him when he was a baby. He was also afraid of flashing lights (hence the name, which is fully Jumpin' Jack Flash Winter), including cameras, and absolutely terrified of thunderstorms. He would attempt to hide under the bed. Large dog, small bed, no go. Actually, he was afraid of water, period. We never found out if he could swim because he wouldn't, but he did like when he got us skunked that one time because we got to get baths in tomato paste and that was yummy, okay? (Thankfully my mom knew to wash his eyes out; I hadn't learned that yet at the time and was also busy washing me. Yes, I brought the dog in the shower with me. It was streamlined that way.)

But Flash was an amazing dog with a wonderful personality who loved everyone who didn't ever attempt to strike him (or me). He always knew how to cheer everyone up. He loved spending time with other dogs. He loved hanging out on the beach, for all he wouldn't go into the water. We joked he had a drinking problem because of how he would drink too fast and then wheeze and then forget to hesitate before starting to drink again.

I miss my boy every day. ♥ Sorry for the ramble!