About eight years ago my wife and I fell in love. Not with each other, that had already happened, but with this big fella. He was a rescue husky that we fell in love with at first sight. His name was Ranger and we didn’t want to make it too hard for him to learn a new name so we named him Danger. Woofington Danger Ringler, to be accurate.
We had lost my wife’s dog Toxie (Toxic Avenger Emery) a few months earlier and were still in mourning. Toxie was another husky mix who had developed cancer at 14. To fill the hole he’d left we took in a stray pit mixfor a couple of months that my wife found on the street. She was a sweet little thing but not ‘ours’ so a friend helped find her a new home and we found our Danger.
He has a personality as big as he is. A big ham. A scaredy cat. A lover boy. He has been through us through thick and thin and he’s our boy. After losing Toxie in 2016 we lost my mother in 2018 after a long and slow decline. That same year we had adopted another husky, a sister for Dangey we named Wendigo. She was a sweetheart and they loved to chase one another and play. We lost her in less than six months, just weeks after we lost mom. She had developed cancer that was eating away at her skull. She was still a puppy and it broke our hearts.
In 2018 we lost my wife’s mother suddenly and unexpectedly and had the first failure on our IVF journey. In 2022, almost two years after we had our daughter, we lost my dad.
After losing so many loved ones, we couldn’t lose Danger.
We can’t.
Last week he suddenly started acting strange out of the blue.
He was sitting on the floor staring at nothing. I got scared and took him to an after hours vet, then to another when the first couldn’t take him. They were worried and ran tests but were not quite sure what was going on. They thought he was OK to go home and so we did.
The next day he was vomiting a lot and was still lethargic.
I tool him back, and this time they did a deeper dive exam and came back to me with two options – surgery or euthinasia.
There was no choice.
We had to save him.
The cost to save him, to perform a surgery that had only a 50/50 survival rate, was over ten thousand dollars.
I had no choice.
People will cluck their tongues.
They will shake their heads.
All I can tell you is that I wouldn’t give up on him. I couldn’t just let him die.
He was going septic from a suspected – and confirmed – tear in his large intestine. He didn’t have long.
I agononized over his several hours surgery.
I balled, again and again, having not cried since I was a teenager.
I expected the worst but he made it.
He survived.
Next he had to survive the next few days.
Day by day I waited for updates, some days were better than others but he was slowly starting to heal.
I am hoping tomorrow we can finally take him home.
He is over an hour away so it’s not easy to see him. You can see in his eyes he is lonely and wants to be home.
In all of this we have accrued a debt I am not sure how we’ll pay off. The payments alone are keeping me up and I have been in a constant state of anxiety but he deserves to live.
We started a fundraiser for those that might be able to help.
We need our boy back.
I need him.
Desperately.
Click the link for the fundraiser. ANYTHING helps.
Thanks.
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 