Remembering Snoopy

Snoopy was my problem child. He was a pet store puppy that was dumped at the pound, adopted, and then returned again. When I saw him he was in a crate with a really big dog and was curled up in the front of the crate into a tiny ball of misery! Not at all like the web site or pictures showed him to be! However, when I took him out on a leash, he pulled me around like I weighed nothing!

After I adopted him I took him home and put him on a leash attached to my couch temporarily. When I came back in the room, he had hopped up into the Lazy Boy recliner and was surveying his new kingdom!

After a while I started to figure out why he might have been returned to the pound twice. He started having seizures… The first one that happened, I threw him in the car and raced to the vet. He was coming out of it by the time I got there, but they identified it as a seizure and said to watch for them. He continued to have them, going rigid and shaking, and all I could do was pet him and talk to him. It was scary and frustrating because they appeared to happen at any time, and obviously scared him as much as they worried me. After they established a pattern of recurring frequently, the vet put him on KBr which controlled them and we didn’t have to worry about them anymore.

Later on, the vet put him on thyroid medicine, then heart medicine, and finally vetoryl for Cushing’s disease. In the end it was costing over $300 a month for medications for Snoopy…but he was such a chill dog that he was worth it. I felt I had to do it anyway, since by adopting him I had made a commitment to him that I would care for him throughout his life, and not dump him the first time something went wrong (which is what I suspect happened with his other two families when he had his first seizure with them).