Thank you to everyone who has supported Drake the Dog’s very long ordeal. For the last eight months, caring for Drake after his double ACL surgery and infections has basically been our whole lives, especially for my spouse. It was a full time job, and my spouse endured it with goodwill and cheer and sheer stubbornness that kept Drake going longer than should have been possible. We poured every ounce of money I made on my writing, and from fan donations, and then some, into his continued treatment, confident that soon, just another week, another week, he’d get over the worst of it, and be on the road to recovery.
We had known that the long-term antibiotics we had to use to treat Drake’s enduring antibiotic-resistant staph infection, which migrated to his spine, could eventually destroy his organs and kill him, but youth was on his side. We carried on, reassured that because he was still very young (just a year and a half) that he could endure it. After all, he’d come so far, and we only had a few weeks left…
But with just 5 weeks left to go in his treatment, after a grueling eight months of surgery and rehab and increasingly potent drug cocktails, his body couldn’t take anymore.
When we took Drake in tonight because he’d stopped eating and drinking and wouldn’t get up, we were quoted a surgery starting at $4,000, on top of everything else we’d done, and we said yes, fine, because we didn’t know what we were dealing with. What had happened to him? He was up and walking around no problem a week ago….
When the doctor opened him up tonight after realizing Drake had sepsis, he found that there were lesions eating through Drake’s stomach and lower GI tract, and there was additional damage to his gallbladder. It was all a rotten, infected disaster caused by the worst of his antibiotics basically eating through his system. For a dog in perfect health, his chances of surviving a surgery that would have involved cutting up his stomach and bits of his guts and retying his gallbladder elsewhere and sewing everything together again would have been 10%. But Drake was not even in OK shape. In his current state, the doctor admitted that Drake’s chances of surviving the surgery for longer than a week or two were basically 0%. This doctor has been with us from the beginning, and promised when to let us know he had reached the end of what he could do.
And he had reached the end.
They kept Drake alive long enough for us to say goodbye to him.
I have never met a better dog. Drake put up with eight months of constant pain and medication and craziness with good cheer and humor. Everyone who met him loved him. We loved him best of all.
As two people with chronic problems, my spouse and I know that you can’t always save everyone. But after dealing with the things we have in our lives, we sure as hell were going to try. Drake put up an incredible effort, and we shuffled our entire lives around his care, but Drake could never catch a break. Not once. Like so many things in life, it was wickedly unfair and cruel in the way that only life can be. You always think hey, if we can just be great caregivers, and come up with the money for the drugs and surgeries, we can save him. But the infection was stronger than us, and stronger than Drake, and it makes me incredibly angry and sad to type that, because it’s an admission that the world is bigger and scarier than we are, and sometimes when the train is moving, you can’t stop it.
I wanted to see Drake running along the beach again, after his double ACL surgery made it possible for him to walk again. That was all I wanted to see, back in November. I just wanted him to live long enough to see him run on the beach again. I will never see that. But hopefully he did, even if only in his dreams.
We love you, buddy.
Thank you again to everyone for your well wishes and support. It means a lot to us.
