Today is the one year anniversary of the tumour on Sora's spleen rupturing. I thought he'd maybe eaten something he shouldn't have in the yard and would need his stomach pumped. I'll never forget when the vet came in and told me "It's not good, blood is filling his abdomen". My world literally fell apart in that moment and truthfully, I still haven't pieced it back together. I've never been so terrified in my life, thinking that I was going to lose my boy that night when I opted for emergency surgery. I didn't, and I'm grateful for the extra three months I got with him.
The tumour just grew so quickly. I'd had him at the vet for his annual check-up in July, and they felt around his abdomen. They felt nothing out of the ordinary and he had no issues, so there would have been no reason to do an abdominal ultrasound. If I'd taken him for his check-up maybe three months later, they could have found it and removed it before it ruptured, which likely would have saved his life. I couldn't have known, though. The cancer develops so rapidly and oftentimes with no symptoms at all, that what happened to Sora is usually the case.
I just can't believe it's been a year. A year of living with this horrible ache in my entire body that hasn't left me for a moment. Radar helps, and stars above do I love this sweet boy more than life itself, but the way Sora left this world wasn't right. It gutted me and left me on the side of the road, and there is a yawning chasm inside of me that is still just as raw and painful as it was a year ago. I'm better at masking it, but it's not gotten any better, not really. Maybe I'll look into therapy for next year, because I'm not handling it well at all. Sora was my light in the dark and the best part of my day, every day. Some days, on my way home from work, I still catch myself thinking about how nice it'll be to go home and bury my face in his fur - and then I realize that I can't.
No wonder I'm so tired all the time. Pretty sure my grief and my anger, combined with dealing with the public at work, completely sap me of my mental bandwidth and leave me completely hollow. I wish I could go back in time to last November and just give myself a warning. I know I'd take it seriously, because all I ever think about is my dogs' mortality, even Radar's, and he's not even a year old yet. I keep hoping that I'll wake up in the past and this will all have been a horrible nightmare, but I've not been lucky yet.
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