Our Sweet Boy

Our sweet boy had a tough day. Let me first tell you that King (our doberman) is our first born, through and through. We adore him. We both remember visiting him at the breeder's home when he was too young to come home. We remember going back to pick him up, giddy with excitement, truly. We drove away with him lying there between us in the truck and just looked at each other with the biggest smiles on our faces. He slept next to our bed in his puppy crate (that was gigantic) the first night, and when he whined, I put my hand down for him to sniff, and all was fine. King stayed his first night in the dorm room we lived in (it was my job!) and moved out with us the next day to our first home. He has never left our side. Those first few months were tough. I was as sleep deprived as any new mom, as he was sick all the time. He had chronic diarrhea and was up every couple of hours every night. I am now a light sleeper, always listening to be sure both of my "babies" don't need me. He has definitely prepared us to be better parents, and today was no different....

King has always been a sensitive dog. He has underlying liver disease, which affects his health on many levels. He has a special holistic vet and is on HUNDREDS of dollars of supplements...a month. We would do it all over again to have him in our life. Well, this morning, he kept us up licking himself, which he does often. So, Jason got extremely annoyed and decided to put him in his crate at about 6am. When we went to put him in there, King was limping, holding his right front paw up. He refused to put any weight on it. It looked like this:

We knew it was too early to get into a vet, so we went back to bed, vowing to call the vet when we got up. We were able to see the on-call vet this morning. After a brief examination, it was determined that he had a minor nailbed infection. An x-ray was taken to confirm. However, the x-ray showed a much more severe nailbed infection. His nail had to be completely taken off, and the infection had eaten the bone in his toe. He had to be put out because it was so painful, the gentle sedation didn't work. (Yeah, don't even ask me about the vet bill). Here is our boy now, bandage and all:

He is currently sleeping very heavily. He looks pathetic, doesn't he? King has taught us so much in the 6 years we have been blessed to have him in our lives. Most of all, we know we can come together and do what we need to when our babies need us. I was almost in tears when the vet told us how bad his infection was, without us knowing! Jason just kept saying, "I wish I would have known. I feel so bad." We can love and take care of King like no one else can. Isn't that what parents do? We can do this! Now....we just need the baby:).