Peanut, the chubby lover

by Scott
(Indiana)

My dog "Peanut" was a chocolate lab and the runt of the litter. We bred her mother "Missy" (also a chocolate lab) with a friends yellow lab. Months later Missy gave birth to a litter of pups and Peanut was one of them. We decided to keep two of the pups; Peanut and Lady.

As I mentioned earlier, Peanut was the runt of the litter and was a bit chubbier than the other dogs. In my opinion, that made her all the more cute and lovable. She had the most adorable personality. She was incredibly friendly and a total ham in the best way possible. She followed me everywhere I went, she loved to play and run with me outside and during the winter she would run and roll around in the snow.

After a few years of having this amazing dog we noticed something on her face that looked like she might have hit her face on something while playing. We didn't think much of it because it was hard and seemed irrelevant. As time passed the lump grew and we became concerned, so we took her to the vet to have the lump examined.

Unfortunately, all of our suspicions were confirmed; it was bone cancer in her jaw bone. We were all devastated. Before this, I had never heard of dog or canine cancer; I just assumed dogs were impervious to everything. They are so fun loving and energetic it is hard to believe they could even get "dog cancer".

We had "Peanut" for many years and she became my best friend. The prognosis for our Peanut was only a few weeks to a month. We held onto hope and prayed that God would give us more time with our beloved dog, Peanut.

To make things even worse, the vet said there were no treatments available for this type of dog cancer. They could only offer surgery and that still wouldn't help much.

But we decided surgery was better than nothing. They took her in and took out one of the lumps from her neck trying to relieve pressure on her throat and esophagus. I'm not sure if it was the surgery, the prayers or both, but the month prognosis was stifled by Peanut's amazing ability to persist and survive.

She lived, in fact not only lived but thrived and lived happily for about 6 to 8 months after the surgery.

However, all the happiness had to come to an end when the cancer started to grow faster. Eventually it became hard for her to eat and she started losing a significant amount of weight.

This was particularly sad because she was always "chubby" and that's what she was known for. At this point, we knew things weren't going to be good so we decided to see how bad it had gotten.

Peanut could hardly eat anything at all without really struggling. We knew it was time, so we took her to the vet and put our Peanut, the chubby lover to sleep to end her suffering.

I didn't want to, but I knew that to make her suffer would be selfish and I didn't want to put my beloved dog through any more pain than she had already endured.

I still see her face everyday and night in my thoughts. I loved that dog like she was my own flesh and blood.