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Back in 2008 my dog Scotch, a Scottish terrier, was diagnosed with leukemia. He's been showing a few signs of it, so I really should have seen it coming...

We noticed he wasn't eating much so we took him in to get x-rayed. From that, we found out he had an enlarged kidney and an enlarged heart. (They were both about 1/4 of their size bigger than they should have been) He was put on meds to get him back to normal. ...At least that's what we had thought.

A few days later, he started having trouble breathing, and was wheezing a lot too. Another x-ray showed he had pneumonia. His luck started getting worse and worse.

Over those past few days he hadn't been moving much. Every so often, however, he would get up and actually show he still had energy.

Finally, we got the call. The vet says without treatment, he would have a few weeks, possibly a few months, left to live. With treatment, however, they told us the most they've seen a dog with it live was another year. The whole family agreed we wouldn't treat it though, it would just be prolonging the inevitable and more than likely putting him through more pain than he should have to go through. So when he started showing signs of even more pain, we put him down.

I couldn't believe it when I heard this. He's been through so much already, and I was sure he'd get through this. Over his lifetime, he's been bit on the nose by a rattlesnake, attacked by a much bigger dog which almost ripped him to shreds, had bikes on the side of the house fall on top of him, almost breaking his legs, been stung by wasps on his paws so he couldn't walk, been bit on his paws by fire ants so he couldn't walk, and a few other things I can't really remember right now...

I can't remember ever crying as hard as I did when I heard what he had. My hands were shaking badly, almost like convulsing. The entire family was sad to hear this, and... Until that day, I'd never seen my dad cry before.

Scotch has had a huge impact on my family, and was the friendliest dog I've ever seen. It was hard to have to let him go... Luckily for me, I've got great friends and family who helped me through this. So thank you, all of you. I'm sure I'll be fine in time.

PaniKing