My Best Friends Have Hairy Legs by Cierra Rantoul

possible, Tink would have like to be able to stay with me forever because she loved me so much, but it was just so hard and she hurt so much. Tink told her to tell me that she would still be with me, watching over me, and that we would meet again.
    When I got home to pick her up I told both her and Trooper where we were going and what was going to happen. I told her that she wouldn’t be in pain anymore and that she would be able to run and be happy. I took Trooper with us. I knew that he wouldn’t understand if I took her away and didn’t come back with her, that he would worry and pace the house like he did when she spent the night at the vet’s for tests. He needed to understand. He would need closure just like I needed confirmation.
    Tink was happy about the car ride—as always. When we arrived at the office, we were put in one of the rooms to wait until the vet and technician were available. I sat on the floor while Tink ran around in circles and occasionally stopping to give me kisses. She was excited—as if she knew the pain was going to stop. I held her a few times and pet her, telling her she would be free of pain soon. Trooper stood over me, facing the door, as if he was protecting both of us.
    The tech came in and took Tink out briefly to put a catheter in her leg. Trooper paced, and unlike his normal quiet behavior, whined a few times at the door, touching the knob with his nose. I told him she would be back, that it wasn’t time yet, and he would have a chance to say goodbye. When they brought her back in, she was even more excited, running in circles again. Trooper sniffed her leg and sniffed her face, then resumed a protective stance near me.
    I picked Tink up and set her on a blanket on the table. Trooper paced around us as they inserted the medicine into her leg. As I held her and whispered over and over again “no more pain” in her ear, I felt her slump against my arm. I told her how much I loved her and how much we would miss her, but that we would be o.k. and we would see her again one day. Then… she was gone.
    After the vet and tech left us alone for a while, I picked her up and sat on the floor with her so Trooper could see her. He hadn’t been able to really see her on the table. He came up to her and sniffed her face a few times, and then he laid down, his back to us and facing the wall. The Tink in my arms was not “his girl” anymore. She was gone and he knew it.
    I had asked them to do a brief necropsy now that there wasn’t any more risk. Her gall bladder and pancreas were enlarged and “not happy” colors. One of them was supposed to be a bright green and instead looked like muddy algae. She didn’t have any gall bladder stones, but she did have four times as many bladder stones as we had seen in the past on x-rays and her bladder was extremely distended with indications of another bladder infection. There wasn’t any mass on or in her stomach, but the portion of her intestine that attached to the stomach has a sphincter muscle that allows food to pass in increments rather than all at once into the intestines. The muscle was inflamed and so tight that the vet couldn’t get her little finger into it. It should have relaxed when she died, but it didn’t. Whether or not this was causing her pain, we couldn’t know, but it was probably contributing to her throwing up undigested food occasionally. But when the vet went to look at her liver, barely touching it as she started the exam, her liver completely fell apart. It did not have the appearance of hepatitis or cirrhosis, and there weren’t any obvious indications of other diseases. Apparently just the pressure of all the other organs around it had been holding it together all this time.
    I knew then that I had made the right decisions in refusing to do biopsies earlier in the year. She most likely would have died on the table if they had taken a biopsy of her liver. With all of her internal organs showing such unhappiness and