** THE LAST 13 MONTHS **

Just shy of 13 months ago, Kamu's back broke at the waist, at the same place as Tikru's did 7 years before. Kamu was a year younger and I was one lost dog wiser, so he was rushed to a surgeon and he was operated. With great effort over the turn of the year, he recovered to walking fairly normally, although he never quite gained full proprioception of his rear legs any more.

Half a year from his back surgery, he needed to have a meibomian epithelioma removed from his eyelid and while we were still waiting to get the pathologist's statement from that, suffered another spinal injury, this time in his neck. He was very ill and we though hard about letting him go, but a promising prognosis convinced us -- despite the fact that we didn't know how malign the removed tumor had been -- and he was operated again, and as projected recovered very quickly and well.

He had a good summer. He learned to swim. I began to hope he might have a few more years with us still.

Then, half a year after the neck surgery, he had to have another growth removed from the same eyelid, this time a benign meibomian adenoma. By cruel twist of fate that made the mockery of those meager good news, only five days had passed after the stitches were taken out before the herniated cervical disk symptoms started again. Once more, he was taken for a surgery. We decided  it would be his last and fervently hoped this would be the end of Kamu's sorrows for at least a little while.

But it was not to be. Just 13 days after his neck had been operated, the same symptoms returned. We tested him for everything we could think of that might cause him to exhibit similar but unrelated pains, but nothing was found in his blood or urine, or in ultrasound.

Kamu's moment in time had been cut cruelly short. He was just 8 years, 5 months and 12 days old.

-- Jouni Pohjola
November 25, 2018