Mission To The Land of The Long White Cloud: A Dickens Kind of Day

Saturday, July 16, 2016

A Dickens Kind of Day

Charles Dickens opens up his famous story Tale of Two Cities with these words:

"It was the best of time, it was the worst of times...."

Today was one of those days.

On the POSITIVE side ... we helped Harbour Stake with their big indexing event. This is part of the world-wide indexing challenge FamilySearch has been promoting in hopes of getting 72,000 indexers working over a period of 72 hours. Indexing is such an important part of making family history records available, so we were glad we could help out.

Go to this link to get started: https://familysearch.org/indexing/get-started-indexer

We took about a dozen laptops from the Family History closet to the event and had various signs and promotional materials to add color to the event. Different people came and went throughout the day. We helped them get logged on and showed them the basics, answering questions as needed. Indexing will probably never be my specialty, but I'm learning enough to assist with basic stuff. It was a fun event with lots of people happy to take part in the project. We were having a great time.

However...part way through the morning we needed to leave to go make a phone call back to the USA to talk to our vet. That's when the bottom dropped out of our day.

Sweet Morgan the Wonder Dog has been struggling lately. When we saw her in January she was perky and well. But since then, our son reported that she wasn't eating much at all and she was getting very thin, She appeared to be very low in energy and just didn't seem herself.

We thought perhaps it was stress from having us leave, then come back, then leave again. We were concerned maybe she didn't get along with Aaron's dogs. We were sad she wasn't thriving, but we were hopeful she was going to be ok. Knowing Aaron's kids were going to be gone to Michigan for six weeks and that Aaron and Stephanie were planning a big vacation, we decided this was a good time to make other arrangements for who should care for our dear dog. So we shifted her to our next door neighbor on Edna Street in Boise. I knew that they would give her lots of tender love and attention, which they did.

Dana was amazing with Morgan. When she confirmed the same thing that Aaron had said - Morgan wasn't eating and she was looking really thin, Dana went the extra mile, cooking chicken and rice and other things to try to entice her to eat. Dana reported that Morgan seemed happy enough, but she was moving very slowly and had very low energy. So we asked to have the vet look her over to see if there was anything serious to be concerned about. We got the email today that we needed to call the vet for his report.

Morgan's vet, Robert Ormond, said he could feel a large mass in her abdomen. Checking all her vitals, he was quite sure she had some form of cancer. We were devastated. Dr. Ormond said he would try her on an appetite stimulant to see if he could get her to eat some, but he didn't hold out much hope.

So now we are preparing ourselves for what is sure to come. We cannot let her slowly starve as the tumor takes over her little body. We'll have to have her put down. So I've cried and cried all afternoon, trying to hold it together when I needed to be around other people, but mostly I'm just falling apart.

We've had our Basset Hound for 12 years and she is a very treasured member of our family. Leaving her behind to go on this mission was so hard. We did the best we could to make arrangements for loving care for her in our absence. Still, we worried over her plenty. She was OUR dog and we knew she would not understand why we went away. I'm not for one minute regretting the decision to serve. This mission was exactly the right thing for us to do. Still, not being able to say goodbye to our beloved pet is a sacrifice we had not anticipated having to make.

Feeling so sad, so utterly bereft over this.

She is such a good dog. The thought of losing her is breaking my heart.