Rest assured ladies and gentlemen, I didn’t really expect to pen this dispatch for several more years.

Over the years that TharpSter.org has been on line, I’ve made it perfectly clear that dogs are generally awesome.  That’s especially true for all of the ones that have rounded out my life in one way or another.  Most notable are the subjects of two different series of posts here on the site.  Faith is the TharpSter TreadMill and the star of The Pit Bull Diaries is Hope.  Whereas I haven’t spent a lot of time making additions to those series recently, I’m afraid that one of them is coming to an end soon.

All things being equal, I’ve always catered to the FIFO system of inventory control when it came to pondering the mortality of my beloved dogs.

Faith is 12 years old.  She’s still a ball of energy, especially when there is a storm in area.  She has no problem dispensing with any semblance of a calm demeanor when the thunder rolls, the lightning flashes, and the rain falls.  At that point we have to wait out the storm with the capable assistance of pharmaceuticals, a straight jacket, and a rubber mallet.

When we rescued Hope 8 years ago, the vet estimated she was about a year old at the time.  Based on that, she’s 9.

On Easter Sunday, a friend at work lost her 14 year old retriever.  Upon seeing the Facebook post reporting that the dog had passed away while in her owner’s arms in the backseat of a truck on the way to the emergency vet, I harkened back to two different points in my life where I lost a dog.

One of those events took place just over twenty years ago at a veterinary clinic on the other side of town.  Poor Sunny had developed cancer.  Every effort had been made to liberate her of such a menace, but her body was having nothing of it.  So one evening in December, 1997, my brother and I said our goodbyes to my favorite yellow lab as she lay there in a kennel.  With one last treatment from the vet, she was gone.

Fifteen years before that, the younger teenaged versions of my brother and I were whisked away from a summer evening of screwing around at the little league ballpark by Dad because of some troubling news he had just received from the home front.  When we got home, we found our first dog Dodger on the back patio.  Mom had already placed a towel over him.  I don’t remember exactly how long it was, however Dodger’s body started rebelling on him about a year before he passed.  That night, we were all blubbering idiots while Dad worked to bury him.

Hope is not doing too well right now.

As much as we would like to believe that her current ailment is born of an innocuous bug that’s easily treated, our optimism diminishes daily as the behavior we know to be characteristic of our beloved brindle pit bull slowly fades.

In the coming week, we’ll learn more about what’s going on.  Lab reports will arrive and be phoned in to yours truly advising me what’s been ruled out.  An x-ray and ultrasound will reveal more.  In the end, we’ll have to make either a very easy decision, or a very difficult one.