We had to let Rufus go this morning.

shoeaholic0403 · October 2010

It's been a very hard day and this decision was really hard to make.

We had known from the start that some of his tissue was going to die and need to be removed. The important thing was to make sure that it didn't get infected during this process.

The first surgery was scheduled for this morning and when they started they realized that the dead tissue went all the way down to his spine. The vet had already said that he might not regain all the movement in his neck because of the damage, but after seeing how deep the dead tissue was it was obvious that even if he was able to recover he would have been pretty badly handicaped. Also, in order to fix the damage he would have had to go to a specialist and have a lot more tissue removed than our vet could have done and he would have needed multiple skin grafts to replace the dead tissue.

It isn't that he wasn't worth it, but it just seemed like a lot to put him through. He would have had such a long recovery and we wouldn't have been able to make him understand why he was always in pain, and at the end of it all his quality of life wouldn't have been even close to what it was before all this happened.

So we made the decision to let him be at peace. We're all heartbroken.

Thank you all for your kind words, thoughts and prayers over the last week. I know that the decision was the best one for Rufus, but it's so hard to say goodbye.