Spike.
Richie took Spike to the vet's yesterday, to get his advice.
Now we know that Spike has bone cancer, we wanted to find out what signs we need to look out for that would tell us he was starting to suffer.
When Richie got back, he told me that the vet thought Spike had only about a month left to live.
His advice was that as he was not in pain and obviously still engaged with and enjoying life and as many biscuits as possible, there was no need to do anything as yet.
But that soon as Spike would not eat and was retreating from the world and started to be in obvious pain, we would need him to be put to sleep quickly so he would not suffer unduly.
Horrible news, not a surprise but a horrible confirmation of the fact we won't have our lovely, energetic, playful and gorgeous little Spike for very much longer.
It is amazing how cheerful and playful he still is despite being sick and losing so much weight so quickly just in the last couple of weeks, it will be so hard to say goodbye to Spike.
I love him so much, we both do, and he is an amazingly lovely loving little fellow with a lot of lust for life, still cheerful and happy when he is so very sick.
I am crying as I write this which makes seeing my text very difficult indeed, just can’t believe that this is happening.
Feels so unreal, at first when Richie told me when he got home I heard and accepted the news but after sometime it became a strange totally unreal thought that our little dog would be dead so very soon.
We will miss him so very much; it has been a tremendous privilege and pleasure to have had him living with us since 2002.
We are going to enjoy all the moments we still have with him while we can, sadly not as many as I had hoped we would have with our beautiful Spike.
When I had to stay in bed 24/7 from August 2008 until the late autumn of 2009 and again for quite alot of this year Spike entertained me and was constantly by my bedside looking out for and keeping me laughing.
