That picture up there is of Nana and my two boys when they were younger. I love that picture because it looks like all three of them are laughing at their own private joke.
Nana was brought to us by a very nice woman who had found her wandering the streets of Boston. No tags, no anything. There was no way to learn anything about her. She was a bit on the thin side when she came to me and my vet put her on a special diet to get her bulked up a bit.
Nana was a beautiful soul. She came to us shortly after my divorce and her company was a god send to me. I had moved to a small cabin in the woods to regroup, but living in the middle of nowhere with two young boys was scarier than I would like to admit. The addition of Nana was exactly what I (and my very overactive imagination) needed.
Unfortunately, since we didn’t even know where she came from, we didn’t run a full battery of tests on her. Soon, it became obvious that all of the love and attention and good food in the world wasn’t helping her. One afternoon, while I sat at the computer, she came over and put her head in my lap. I gave her a scratch behind her ear and a kiss on her nose. She turned around three times, like all dogs do, and laid down on the floor next to my chair. She heaved a big heavy sigh and…that was it.
I had an autopsy done on her because it was truly killing my vet and I, not knowing what the hell was wrong with her. We sent her body to a lab in Maine and they confirmed that Nana had Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Apparently this is a disease spread by ticks, like Lyme Disease, but is rarely seen in the northern states, so no one had thought to test for it. I beat myself up for a long time after she died. I should have made it clearer to the vet that Nana could have come from anywhere. But I know that, even if we had diagnosed it, she could have had the disease for so long that there still wouldn’t have been anything we could have done.
Still, that’s not a mistake I’ll be making again.
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