George, RIP

Saturday started out as a beautiful day, I woke up in plenty of time to go to the cowboy action shoot. Halfway there I realized that I had forgot to take my morning pills but then I often don't take those until afternoon, anyway. I even had time to eat a little something on the way to the shoot, two of Mickey D's sausage egg and cheese biscuits. More fat than I'm supposed to have but I get more exercise at a shoot than anywhere else.

I shot another personal best match, the poor old Range Officer is still having to drag an eight day grandfather clock from stage to stage to keep my time but my accuracy is improving. I just wonder how I would have done had I remembered to take my "shakey pills", the two capsules I take to control the tremors. Those are morning meds since I don't much care if my hands shake in my sleep.

I actually won a certificate for finishing second in my class, I guess I would be real proud if there had been more shooters in my class, a third one would have been nice. I got back to town and called home, Linda Lou told me about the shooting and yelling from down the street and said that George was missing. I got home and went looking, I found him in a nearby field, unable to rise, unable to move his feet. He was still breathing, though.

I rushed back home and cleared the crap out of the back of the car and got a sheet, I rolled him on to the sheet and got him in the back of the van, I didn't quite rupture myself but it was close. While I was doing that, Linda had called our Vet, unfortunately it was too late on a Saturday and I had to take him some forty+ miles to the emergency Vet. I made that run at well over the speed limit with my emergency flashers on the whole way, not that they do much good. Maybe one driver out of ten knows to pull out of the way for somebody with the flashers going.

We got George inside and they hit him up with a shot for the pain while I filled out the paperwork, they then looked him over and cleaned him up a little. Because of George's size he needed multiple X-rays, he is too big for just one to cover his whole spinal column. The Vet, before the X-rays had to tell me that George either had a broken spine or just a severe shock to his spine. It would take X-rays at a hundred bucks a pop to find out. While everyone, including me, knew that the odds were against him, I ordered the X-rays. Then I waited. Eventually the Vet came out with the X-rays, they were a death sentence. We could see the displacement in his spine, along with the bunch of birdshot.

The Vet told me about the eight thousand dollar surgery that had a one in a thousand chance of letting George walk again. I opted for the shot.

They put George in a cardboard coffin and I brought him home. By then it was well past dark so I just left him in the car until morning. I got up early and started digging his grave. Between my back and that stroke it took me until late afternoon to dig a German Shepherd sized grave. Dig it I did, with a certain amount of rude comments from the boss about why I didn't spend the fifty dollars to have him cremated. The bottom line, though was that it would have cost more than double that to have him cremated alone and for us to get the ashes back.

I didn't want George to be cremated with a bunch of other critters and then thrown in the trash. Nobody cared about him when he was a puppy. He had about six months or so with me and then he had to lay in that field for five or six hours, with his mouth full of dirt before I found him. Most of his life he had no human contact. I did get to scratch his ears as he died and I buried him in the spot where he liked to lay in the sun. He has his favorite plush chew toy with him. My heart is a cinder.

For some reason my service is so slow today that I cannot upload any pictures of George. There are a few good ones in the archive, October and November and earlier.

Before anyone asks, yes, I know who did this. It is a long story, the person has a plausible explanation, it does not matter that it would be a lie, I'm stuck with not being allowed to fill him with birdshot, break his spine and leave him laying in mud. Damned Democrats.