Sydney's New Year's Resolution

Sydney is my fur baby in a beagle-shaped package.  I've had her for 5-ish years (I think??) and together we have moved 12 times to various homes, including our most recent trek across the country from NC to CA.

At the Petrified Forest National Park (but apparently you aren't supposed to let your dogs on the bajillion year old wood... who knew?)

Really bored in the back of the truck for 8 days.

Now, I'm pretty sure that dogs don't pick out New Year's Resolutions.  Which I think makes them smarter than most people.  If you couldn't tell, I'm not a big fan of New Year's Resolutions.  If you don't like something, fix it now...don't resolve to fix it only at the start of the New Year.  I think it just annoys me that they almost always fail (I'm guilty of this as well.  No pointing fingers here.).  Case in point, my gym is already filled with the "New Year's" crowd.  Which would be a great thing, except that I know most of them won't stick it out and will be gone in like two weeks, which is sad.  Anyway, off the soap box.

I have made an exception to my soap box rule for the dog and have made a resolution for her:  "In 2012 I will stop trying to die every late December/early January."

At the start of last January, she ruptured a disc in her neck and had to undergo emergency surgery to fix it.  Poor little thing was in insanely excruciating pain and was super pitiful.  I'm sure it was quite a sight to watch me on crutches (snowboarding is very different from surfing apparently) trying to maneuver her around during her two months of very intensive and critical cage rest.  Took about 4 months for her to get back to normal.  But she did recover fully.

This Saturday she tried to die again.  I got up early in the morning to find her in some kind of crazy anaphylactic shock.  After monitoring her vitals for a while, it was pretty obvious that she was having some serious issues with oxygen flow, and her temperature was dropping rapidly, so I took her to the vet.  She was in pretty bad shape (couldn't stand, super lethargic, loss of blood flow to her limbs, etc.) when I left her.  After pumping her full of fluids and putting her on oxygen, she turned right around.  I was able to bring her home that afternoon and she has been on the mend ever since.

Crazy thing is that we have NO IDEA what caused this.  I spent the entire day combing my house from bottom to top trying to find something that she could have gotten into/eaten/gotten bitten by/etc... Nada. Zip. Zilch.  Chest and abdomen X-rays came back normal, full blood panel and urinalysis came back normal.  Craziness.  Vets and myself are super stumped (especially because of the symptoms she presented;  they were conflicting...?).

So, the plus side is that the dog is healing.  She is almost back to her normal self.  The bad is we don't know what caused it or why.  Hopefully it was just a one-time freak deal.  

For fear of having my dog die, I ended up spending a wild and crazy New Year's Eve watching movies with her and falling asleep at about 9:30 pm.  Which is OK by me, since it was already the New Year on the east coast by that point anyway!  Oh, and for my friends who are small animal vets, you should definitely move to CA and start a practice, because you would make a killing.  Sheesh.