 Sex: Female Weight: 51-100 lbs
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Leave a bone for Arabella (died at 21 mos. old)
Nicknames:
Arie, (My Pretty) Pony
Quick Bio:
Likes:
DOG PARK...DOG PARK!! She also likes anything she can tear apart, she especially likes cardboard boxes and paper.
Pet-Peeves:
Extreme chaos, Bigger than her or aggressive dogs.
Favorite Toy:
She likes ALL toys...and toys that aren't toys...and kids toys and...
Favorite Food:
Arie eats everything, food or not food, it doesn't matter to her. She especially likes to eat parts from small non-living stuffed creatures, she seeks them out.
Favorite Walk:
DOG PARK...DOG PARK!! The one with all the ponds where she swims some but mostly she loves to wait for our Chocolate Labrador, Abbey to walk by so that at the precise opportunity she can pounce on her to try to take away whatever stick or toy Abbey has.
Best Tricks:
I can SIT! MostlyI can WAIT (stay)...but it gets so hard sometimes and then I can't.
Arrival Story:
I knew I wanted a Weimaraner puppy. I was talking to rescue groups and to breeders, learning all I could about them and finding out about upcoming litters to be born. A few days later, I was driving home from work and saw a new pet store (HAPPINESS IS PETS/DOWNER'S GROVE, IL-BREEDER: STEVE KRUSE) that specializes in every breed of dog and has about 100 puppies at a time. I thought I'd stop in "just to look at the breed". It was all over right then and there. I knew it was wrong to buy a puppy from a petshop but I wasn't able to leave without a puppy either. I chose from about 10 Weimaraner puppies over two days, each day spending 4 or 5 hours with them. I ended up with the best dog, with the calmest disposition...very unlike the true weimaraner. One of Arie's sisters was so out of control nearly the whole 5 hours I was at the pet shop. She was a classic Weim. Arie was nothing like her. Arie plopped herself in my lap and just layed there most of the time enjoying being cuddled. Sometimes she would get up and would play in small spurts but would always return to my lap. She was my dog!! She was going home with me!! I was in love and still am. She is such an angel girl and stunningly beautiful as well...what more could I ask for?
Bio:
Today, October 14th, 2005, Arie's short life ended. I put my dog to sleep today and it was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life! She didn't even make it to see her 2nd birthday! I have no idea how life will go on without my beautiful, dog; my pretty pony!! Arie began having grand mal siezures last halloween in October of 2004. She was only 10 months old when her seizures began. It was so scary and I didn' t have a clue seizures could be so violent and ruthless. I had seen seizures before, not like these though, these are different. These are earth shattering. Arie tenses up so tightly, paddles her legs with all her might. Her head jerks so voilently that she breaks/grinds teeth and she SCREAMS this horrible blood curdling scream that neighbors houses away can hear. After her first seizure stopped, poor Arie was smeared with her own feces and urine, she was temporarily blind and she had no clue who we were. She knew something really really wrong and bad had happened but she didn't know what and she didn't know who had done it to her. While my husband grabbed the other dogs and got them out of the room, I tried to approach her to comfort her but could not get near. She cowered in the corner while barking profusley in a way I had never ever seen, nor heard any dog do. I had to call 911 because I was not sure I could get control over my dog. She was so frightened and it was the saddest thing I ever saw. I felt so bad for her. The officer taking my call tried to hear/understand what I was saying but with her barking so loud and so fast he couldn't hear anything. He finally yelled that he'd send someone to me. Before police could arrive I got the idea that even if she bit me, she was weak from the seizure and therefore as long as I blocked my face while trying to capture her to calm her, I would most likely be only mildly injured even if she did get me. I decided to grab a thick blanket off the bed and throw it over her head in an effort to catch and contain her. I needed to show her that I was there to help. It worked! Once it was over her head so she could not bite, I put my hand on her and began petting her all the while, continuing to talk sweetly to her as I had been doing all along. At first when my hand came in contact with her, she startled and growled at me which she had never done and has never done since. She tried to turn her mouth/head in the direction of my hand but soon she realized even though she did not recognize me, I was no threat. I only wanted to pet her, to love her and to lay there with her. I quickly put her at ease. We stayed like that for about 15 minutes during which time my husband called the police and told them we had managed to get Arie under control and they were no longer needed. Over time, I was able to slowly remove the blanket from over her head. Soon I got her in the tub and cleaned my frightened huge puppy. About 2 1/2 months went by before it happened again. This time we knew better how to handle it. This time I kept my hands on Arie the whole time and never let them leave her body. That way even when she began to come out if it, even if she didn't know us, she at least knew we were there to help and comfort, not to hurt or scare her. At first Arie would have only one seizure in a day. By the time she was just over year old, she was having them in clusters. Some days she'd endure 4 or 5. Keep in mind that for each one or set of several, when she comes out of them, she is blind, very sensitive to noises, does not know who we are, has eliminated on herself and surrounding area. Then as if that weren't enough, she needs to pace for 1-3 hours while the brain tries to reset itself. During this pacing (postictal stage) she is totally unresponsive. She tries to scale walls, walks into walls and keeps stepping as if the wall isn't stopping her, stares into space and gets ravinously hungry to the point where she will stop at nothing to get at whatever it is that she thinks she wants. Okay, the seizures...while much more violent than most dogs have (she actually breaks of/wears down teeth when her jaws clack together), I think, this is something we can manage, something we can try to fix, lessen the effects of, so I schedule an appointment with a neurologist. We see one, then another. The tests they want to do are several thousand dollars. I am newly pregnant at the time and won't be working at my job when the baby comes. Treatment is the same with or without the diagnosis...so we opt to start phenobarbital without the tests, 30 mg, twice a day. From this we get bowel/bladder control! Arie no longer loses her contents while seizing, a huge step forward. At least we no longer have to bathe a 75 pound terrified dog after such an event. Over time, after many days of clusters of seizures (every 10 days or so Arie would seize averaging 3 seizures per incident), we increased the phenobarbitol many times and have added potassium bromide as well. Nothing helps. We get nothing more, she still has seizures every 10 days or so and many times it takes the whole day to deal with it. All plans get cancelled and Arie gets watched and cared for very closely on a seizure day. During this time I am still working and so sometimes it has meant moving a client I was supposed to see to a different day. Luckily, people are pretty pet friendly and all of them that I moved were understanding and sympathetic. Okay, just when I thought things were pretty tough with my sick dog Arie also starts getting unexplained high fevers, 105 degrees. We pay hundreds of dollars to the vet and they can't find anything wrong. Arie always had some kind of infection. At a year and a half old, she had too many seizures to count-once she had 11 seizures in a 36 hour period, several ear infections, several bladder/urinary infections (which caused my dog to wet on carpet in front of me after being totally housebroken for over a year), she became a bed wetter, too,...urine would visibly dribble out while she slept leaving her to wake up in a puddle. In her last days she was taking 259 mg of phenobarbital, and 2000 mg of potassium bromide each day. The fevers she'd get would leave her so sick she could barely stand on her own, she wouldn't eat or drink for days until the antibotics would kick in. The fevers would make her body really uncoordinated and she would do this thing we called "splat pony". Her legs would give out from underneath her and she would literally be like bambi when he slips on the ice in the classic Disney movie and she'd crash to the floor...many times a day. This happened to her on a regular basis on our hardwood floors. Arie also had to have blood tests twice a year to make sure we weren't damaging her liver with her medications, not to mention her other regular visits and vaccinations. It finally came down to letting her go! The team of neurologists think that Arie has some rare disorder that they see in about one weimaraner per year. Her white blood cells do not work. The result is the seizures, the fevers, the high white cell counts (52000 white blood cells in a sample taken the last time she ran a fever of 105 degrees). My dog couldn't be fixed. We tried for a year to find a way. On several occassions I've held my infant daughter on one side of my body while I layed the other side across my seizing dog so she wouldn't hurt herself. I did this because I wanted it to work. I've walked around for a year with huge claw marks under my clothing from the seizures I have been a party to (she paddles furiously during her fits). Today, when I realized she was sick again, I knew it was time to let her go. I packed up my 13 year old daughter (who volunteers hours at our vet's office), my 11 year old son, my 3 month old daughter and my very sad sick dog and I went and ended her precious life. My husband is away on business travel and so could not be with her. My head is pounding as I type this. My cheeks and swollen eyes are raw from all the wiping. All the love in the world and thousands of dollars (even though I didn't spend thousands on the tests, it all added up to several thousand dollars to keep Arie alive for the year we were all figuring it out-her medication alone was over $50 per month) couldn't save my dog and today I realized it was cruel to keep her alive. I lost my best friend in this world. It hurts so badly!
The Groups I'm In:
♥weimaraners♥
I've Been On Dogster Since:
| August 13th 2004 |
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More than 5 years! |
Rosette, Star and Special Gift History
Dogster Id:
60932
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