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| May 9, 2006 Thank you everyone for your contributions to the Relay for Life! It was a smashing success! Without your help we couldn't have met my goal of $500... but you had to out do yourselves and donated $570! :-D Now if that wasn't enough, Michelle was able to raise $150 through local contacts, and with additional last minute offline contributions, we were able to raise a whopping Grand Total of $788 donated in Lucy's and Aunt Sanni's names to help fund cancer research! That is INCREDIBLE! Everyone deserves a Giant round of applause! See pictures from the Relay for Life 2006. Many thanks to everyone who has donated money and time, you have earned a permanent place of glory on the Isle of Lucy, in our hearts, and in cancer research. -- Christine |
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| March 30, 2006 Losing Lucy was a tragedy in our family. For six years, Lucy was the center of our attention, the focal point in all of our lives. She was not just a dog, but a loved family member. We have been through so much with her. In her road of life, there were many twists, turns and bumps, but we always managed and expected to get over them. I guess this is one reason it is so hard for us to accept her loss…we are sore losers. Lucy had so much going against her but still managed to love life and friends; severe idiopathic epilepsy, histiocytosis a cancer of the immune system and an autoimmune disease, hip displaysia, hypothyroid, urinary incontinence, entropian in her left eye among others. In the end, she passed away from a severe case of pneumonia caused by the cancer. If it was not for Lucy, I would not have considered veterinary medicine as a possible future for me. Lucy taught me so very much with all of her illnesses and resilience to bounce back and love life and friends… I cannot put it all into words. I just wish she would not have taught me this last important lesson; how to say goodbye to a cherished friend. We picked up Lucy's ashes the day after. I can't even describe how it felt... it was like a slap in the face with reality. Here she is, a pile of ashes. We stopped at church on the way home with her ashes, looking for hope, praying for the best for Lucy and hoping for healing. Lucy left us at 105.8 lbs and was returned to us the same size as she was when she was a pup. We decided to donate all of Lucy's unused medicines to her neurologist. She has promised to pass them on to families with dogs or cats who are in need of these medicines, but are in need of fiancial assitance. Lucy's still helping people and other dogs. Some have asked us if we're going to get another Giant Schnauzer, or at the very least another dog. I think it will take a great deal of time before we will be able to open our hearts again to another dog...our loss of Lucy is too great a pain in all of our hearts. ~Christine April 18th, 2006 We would like to thank everyone who has emailed us and sent cards with your condolences and prayers. In situations like these, its good to know there is a strong community standing with you and supporting you. I haven't been able to talk much about Lucy's passing, its just been too hard. This Tuesday (April 18, 2006) she will have been gone for 3 weeks, I still can't believe it. I'll still think its time to feed her, or think I see or hear her, but she's not there. Or things will be going just fine, then something remind me of Lucy and I just start crying. The entire family has taken our loss of Lucy loss very hard. What happened? Lucy passed away March 28th, 2006 in the morning, sometime between 3:30 and 6am. I had taken her to work (I am a Veterinary Technician) with me the day before as she had developed a cough, and we suspected she had gotten pneumonia (xrays and lab work confirmed it) again so we put her on meds and I took home a bag of fluids. During the night Lucy went down hill quickly. I woke up at midnight and she had a fever of 107.7F and was having trouble breathing. I moved her into the bathroom with cold tile floors and covered her with bags of ice and ran a liter of fluids into her, subQ. After two hours I had managed to bring her temp down to 104.0F and she was breathing easier. I was setting up to sleep in the hallway for the night when she used all of her strength to try to get up, I helped her and she barely managed to wobble back into our room. I slept on the floor next to her, and when I woke up she had passed away. In a panic I tried doing mouth to snout, but she was already long gone. We are very grateful that Lucy passed away quickly, and very angry that she passed away so quickly...if that makes any sense. We were so sure that she would beat this again, it never even crossed our minds that she would die. The day before, she was still walking around and doing her tricks, posing for the camera and being herself. We just can't believe it. ~Christine |
| Many Giant thanks and hugs go out to the people who have donated money in Lucy's memory for the Relay for Life. Your support means more to us than you will ever know, we don't know how to thank you. Christine Lessard Crystal & Cinder Schnauzer The Scotts - Danielle, Malcolm, Victoria, Jasmine & Macy Julie Barnhill Karen Davidson Rachel Morgan Pam Foster Richard Masshedar, Family & Giants Sue O'Hearn-Brennan Pamela Murphy Chris Losurdo Tim Shippy Tera & Marty Stosio Mary Jane Beyer Dr. Lynda Uphouse Terri Beardsley Mary DuBois Ann McElroy Barbara Crisafulli Seth Thayer Judith Addison 2 Anomynous Donators Michelle, Lea, Kari & Christine Savolainen |
| Many Giant thanks and hugs go out to the Uphouse Research Lab at Texas Woman's University for making a donation in Lucy's memory to Operation Kindness, a no kill animal shelter, to help a German Shepherd named Boo have an important surgery. I'm glad to announce Boo has now been adopted to her forever home! |
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| Many people have written to the Isle of Lucy with condolences and words of wisdom during this trying time. Hopefully others will find words of comfort here as well for the loss of their beloved ones. Condolences & Words of Wisdom |
| From one of my favorite dog books, "How to Speak Dog" by Stanley Coren, I wanted to share with everyone a passage. I often felt this way at night as I layed in bed, waited for sleep to come, and listened in the dark to Lucy's heavy rhythmic breathing. Lucy's breathing were the last sounds I heard the night she passed away...it was the sound I fell asleep to, as I had fallen asleep to for the six previous years. Stanley Coren has put this into such beautiful and perfect words, I just wanted to share it with everyone. I'm sure every dog lover knows this loving sound and warm feeling...
Sometimes I think I can still hear Lucy breathing, ~Christine "There is one sound that dogs make which I have not included in my discussion of Doggish vocalizations. I didn't include it because it is an automatic sound, which probably was not intended by either evolution of the gods to be communication at all, but it has come to mean something to me. It is the sound of dogs breathing. At night, when I lie down to sleep, my old dog Wiz lies on the bed beside me, while Odin lies on a cedar chip pillow on the floor close by my head. Just across the room, my puppy, Dancer, who is not quite fully house-trained, sleeps in his wire kennel. In the quiet and the darkness, sounds are amplified. I can hear the low, slow breathing of the big black dog, the short breaths of the orange puppy, and the occasional sniffle and snore of the old white dog. As I listen to those soft sounds, I think of some earlier man, lying in a cave or rude shelter, resting on a bed of hides or straw. It was a hostile, dangerous world. Weapons were primitive, resources often sparse, and there were menacing things that moved in the night. That long-gone ancestor also had dogs who lay beside him as he tried to sleep. His dogs breathed these same sounds and these sounds had meaning. They were not merely part of the language of nature - they were the sounds of safety and comfort, a recitation of the dog's eternal contract with humans. "I am here with you," the dog's breath said. "We will face this life together. There is no beast or intruder that can steal up on you undetected because I am here, and I will be your eyes and ears. No harm will come to you because I am at your side to warn you, and to defend you if need be. "We will hunt together tomorrow. We will herd together tomorrow. We will share sunshine tomorrow. We will explore this world together. We will play together, even though neither of us is any longer a child. "If luck turns bad, then when you grieve, I will comfort you. You will never need to be alone again. I promise this. As your dog, I will sing this promise to you, and whisper it to you at night, every night, with my breath." I can hear these words in my dogs' soft sounds of breathing, and just like my ancient ancestor, I understand these words and I am comforted. In my heart I know that if the language of dogs were so limited that this was the only message they could send, it would still be enough." -Stanley Coren How to Speak Dog |