Goodbye, Pretzel

I had unfortunate news to share, and a sad post to write tonight. Sadly, our sweet little Pretzel boy passed away last night.

He was 12(ish) years old, and we adopted him when he was about 4 years old. These next two photos are the day we adopted him, back in 2016. We actually got him the day before Valentine’s Day, so we had him just a few days shy of 8 years. We had actually gone with Nita that day for her to adopt a new dog, and we ended up falling in love with this little boy as soon as we saw him. We already had Primrose at the time, but we just couldn’t resist adding a second dog to our little family.

This is my favorite picture of both my doggies together, just shortly after moving into our current house here. Primrose (on the left), died unexpectedly back in 2017, when Emerson was less than two months old. So even though she was our first doggie, we had Pretzel twice as long as we had her. (But she was my doggie, and Pretzel was always more of Jeff’s doggie, and I still can’t believe how much I miss her.)

This was actually the day Primrose ended up dying; they were literally glued to each other’s side that whole day. She had gotten sick (from eating/ingesting the plastic piece of the toilet paper holder thing; and it tore up her intestines past the point of surgery) and I think Pretzel knew she was sick and wanted to stay by her side.)

Even from a tiny baby, Emerson has always been ultra obsessed with Pretzel through the years.

This is one of my favorite photos of him from years back, when he stole a piece of garlic bread at Nana’s house, and we could not get it out of his mouth, so he just looked like he was smiling with it.

And then when we had Addison, Pretzel was always sleeping by her and guarding over her while she slept.

And soon she was just as interested in him as well.

He was the best little cuddle dog, and as soon as I sat down on the couch with a blanket every night, he was curling up right next to me on the blanket too. And he would stay by my side all night… until he decided to abandon me to get pets from Daddy.

With Emerson being sick this past week, we were actually home with him for a few extra days, so that was special that we all ended up with more time with him, unknowingly at the time. This photo was from during the day yesterday, when he was still acting perfectly fine, with no signs of any issues.

Well, no new signs of issues. For a few years, he’s had seizures, and a heart murmur, and dental decay, and recently he also developed bladder stones as well. So he definitely wasn’t healthy, but he seemed fine yesterday… up until about 8:30 at least.

And then he started acting very strange and we thought he was having one of his seizures. So I actually sat down with him in the kitchen floor for a long time, just keeping him still and calm and petting him over and over again. But then he would kind of bark and yelp in pain, and he was breathing weird and arcing his head way backwards.

By this point, we had luckily gotten Addison to fall asleep, and laid down in her bed. Emerson was still awake though, and very worried about “her boy.” Jeff said he could just intrinsically feel that something was different about this time, and knew he needed to take him to the vet. So he fixed him up on towels in this laundry basket, and got Emmie out of bed to come love on him, for what we were scared would be the last time.

I tried to take one more picture of him, but unfortunately it turned out blurry.

Then about 30 minutes later (I was luckily able to get Emerson calmed down and to sleep shortly after he left), Jeff called me crying, and said Pretzel actually died in the car before he made it to the emergency vet’s office. They tried to do CPR on him, but it wasn’t working, and when they did a brain scan, there was no brain activity. We don’t really know exactly what happened, but our best guess is that he had a really bad seizure that his already-sick-heart couldn’t handle, and he just couldn’t make it through. I of course was instantly sobbing on the phone too, but we had to make a quick decision whether to cremate him, or handle the self-burial. All of our families pets from the last 10-ish years are buried at my aunt & uncle’s farm out in Gadsden County (including my Primrose), so of course we chose to do that.

They offered to keep him over night and get him ready for pickup today, so that’s what we did. Jeff went back to pick him up this morning, and went out to the farm with Uncle Keith to bury him.

First thing this morning, when the girls started looking for him, we just said he was still at the vet’s office, because we weren’t ready to tell them about it yet. But then when Jeff got back from burying him, they were asking where he was (I hadn’t told them where he went; I think they just assumed he was picking up Pretzel), so we kinda chose on the fly to break the news to them. Although Addison was the one asking over and over, “Where’s my Pretzel boy?” she didn’t really understand when we told her he wasn’t coming back. (She quickly left to use her play vacuum to clean, while we kept talking to Emerson.)

Emerson seemed a little shocked at first, but then once it hit her, she was of course devastated. She asked us lots of questions, and we tried to answer them as best we could, especially since we didn’t have all the answers ourselves. We basically told her that he was more sick than we realized, and he couldn’t make it through the night. We tried explaining the seizures and heart problems, and just said his tiny body and little heart couldn’t handle it anymore. She curled up in Jeff’s lap crying hard for a long time, then came and sat with me on the couch and we cried together some more.

All throughout the day after that, she would just randomly say, “I wish Pretzel was here,” or “I wish I could have had Pretzel with us for just a little longer.” It was a pretty rough day… (And we were actually supposed to be doing a church even out of town today, that she was still not well enough to go to, and she was super sad about that starting at 7am, and then super sad about Pretzel around 11am, and it was just rough after that.)

We needed to get out of the house, so we met up Grammy and Papa for love loves and distraction and chips & salsa. And that did help boost our spirits a good bit.

It’s been a very sad, very strange, very hard day. We’ve now had both of our little doggies pass away, mostly unexpectedly. And we are now a family without a pet. (After we got married, we made it like, 3 whole weeks without an animal in our house, before we spontaneously ended up at the shelter, adopting Primrose one Saturday.) We’re going to take some time before rushing to get another pet, but Emerson has already asked when can we get another dog. The house feels very strange without Pretzel in it, and I’m sure it’ll be that way for a long time.