Sam .. the first of many I am sure

As I type this tonight, my beloved beagle is at my feet. Curled up on a red fleece blanked put under my desk just for him. Every night when I check my email, farm on facebook and generally peruse the wonder that is the Internet, Sam is there. Snoring away, making little beagle sleeping noises.

Sam did not start out as my dog. No, we only met a few years ago (incidentally, that coincides with me meeting Grant). Grant got Sam as a puppy and raised him to be his bird dog. According to Grant, Sam loved being a bird dog until he got a mouth infection and was forced into retirement. Which, by the way, suits him well.

I met Sam the first time I went to Grant's house and it was love at first sight. I had a beagle for about 2 days when I was 5, but she nipped me on the nose and my parents gave her away. I always wanted another one and, as luck would have it, one fell into my lap.

From then on whenever Grant came to visit, Sam would come with him. Whenever I was down visiting, I had Sam with me, much to the chagrin of his then-roommate (not a dog lover by any stretch of the imagination).

Fast forward a year or so and Grant and I are living together. Sam has become my constant companion and I am rarely without him. He sleeps in bed next to me at night and on weekends can be found riding shotgun and going through the drive-thru at McDonald's for ice cream. He is more my dog now that Grant's. Not that he minds because what makes me happy makes him happy. Sam sits in my lap every night, he was sitting in the kitchen when we got engaged. Every time I am sick, he curls up next to me and won't let me out of his sight.

We have a new house now, one with a second story. Sam, being 13, has some trouble with the stairs, but still refuses to let me out of his sight. If I go upstairs, even for a minute, he follows me. Although he is on to me now and sometimes only goes up halfway until he is sure I am going to stay awhile.

A few months ago, Sam started coughing. I noticed his glands were a little swollen so I took him to the vet. She diagnosed him with allergies and when I asked for a chest X-ray told me it was unnecessary. She noticed some growths on his belly and asked me to bring him back for a checkup. I did, and she decided he had skin cancer from sunning his belly. Totally a beagle thing. She did an X-ray, but only of his belly. She still did not think he needed one of his chest -- it was just allergies after all. She operated on him and removed a tumor from his belly, reminding me to give him his allergy pills so he didn't cough and tear his stitches.

Fast forward 10 days and we are back at the vet for stitch removal. I am still asking her to check his glands (still swollen) and his cough. Nope, allergies. I start calling her office and the staff says the same thing -- and they are rude. I started searching for a new vet as his cough got worse. Finally I found one I liked and took my darling beagle in, terrified that he had bronchitis.

As I sat in the exam room waiting for him to be X-rayed I prayed to God to let him be alright. To not be sick. I prayed as hard as I could that he would just have a cough. I tried not to think about the fact that his glands were swollen and the doctor could not hear his heart beat because his lungs were so noisy. I sat in that room for 45 minutes praying that my baby would be OK and that I had not spent too much time trying to get Dr. Park to listen to me.

Sadly, Dr. Thompson told me that Sam has cancer. Specifically, he has lymphoma. He has 8 tumors on his lymph nodes, which on dogs are in their throat. That is why he is coughing. That is why his breath was sounding labored. I asked him how this happened, how this was missed and he had nothing to tell me other than it shouldn't have been.

So now we are going to see a veterinary oncologist to see if there is anything we can do. We are not going to go to extraordinary measures for him -- we just want to keep him comfortable and happy for as long as we can.

I am heartbroken. Devastated. I can't look at him or think of him without crying. I am hoping that, writing being as therapeutic as it is for me, blogging about this will keep me sane. I am going to chronicle our journey in the hopes that it brings to light the fact that vets, even with all of their schooling, should listen to their patients. Sometimes, even a dog mother's intuition is better than all the schooling in the world.

That being said, I am going to fight for Sam and do everything I can to make him feel better. I am also going to do everything I can to make sure EVERYONE knows that Dr. Park at Sun Ranch Pet Hospital in Los Lunas does not listen to her clients, works on her own agenda, allows her staff to be rude to her clients and does not know that swollen glands and a cough are NEVER symptoms of canine allergies. I have a vendetta and I WILL do all I can to make her malpractice and lack of compassion known.