Alas, beloved Frankie is no longer with us. He passed just an hour or two into April 1, 2018 at the age of 13, the last 10 of which he was with me. I took him in as a rescue when he was roughly 3 years old in 2008. His original name was Guinness, which is a decent enough name, but I could never remember it when I needed to yell at him about something, so I changed it to Frankie, after Frank Sinatra — the original ol’ Blue Eyes — because of Frankie’s very light blue eyes.
In the middle of the night on or about July 1, 2017, Frankie suffered his first seizure. It was hugely traumatic to both of us: him, because he was all mixed up and wasn’t himself, behaving differently than he had his whole life and forgetting things he knew well; and me, because I had to watch him struggle so mightily with it all. Watching a loved one struggle and suffer like that is definitely the worst, hardest thing I’ve ever experienced. But by the end of July, Frankie had regained about 80% of his former self. We put it behind us and started to go back to normal, happy times.
Then, almost 6 months later to the day, he had another seizure in very early January of 2018. For the next 3 months, it was a nightmare. The seizures began to slowly increase in frequency, and as things rolled into February, I was living with the worst sort of terror hanging over me: that Frankie would have another seizure. They were unbearable to witness, and then trying to nurse him back to some sort of normalcy could take many hours at any time of the day or night, usually starting at night and continuing on well into the next day. Often it took a day or two of constant watchfulness to help him recover. Maybe the worst part was he had no idea why or what was happening to him. The vet could find nothing in his blood tests or his ultrasounds or x-rays. They often mentioned the possibility of a brain tumor, but they said the only way to know if it was a brain tumor was to do an MRI, which is prohibitively expensive. And even then, there are only two outcomes: you know he doesn’t have a brain tumor; or you know he does. If he does, the treatment options for a 13 year old dog have an extremely low probability of giving him any kind of respite, but most like would have resulted in even greater suffering and an even earlier demise.
Now, roughly 4 months after his passing, I’ve reached a state of recovery such that I can write about this, and do other related things, like go through the 4,000 pictures I’ve taken of Frankie over the years and clean them out and organize them a little bit. I even created an account on costcophotocenter.com and had a couple prints made. That’s progress people! Here are a few of my favorites:
