Reply #9: Andy

[nuxvomica]

We had gotten him from a family that raised horses and purebred Shelties. He was a standard tri-color and the runningest, barkingest dog I've ever known. He loved to chase around the house or the yard but nirvana for him was to run around the campus of a nearby elementary school.
One time we were chasing each other around the house and he slid on a slick magazine on the floor and hurt his right front leg. He gave a big shriek when it happened and sat there holding up the injured leg. I, of course, treated him like a baby and comforted him profusely. By the time we got to the vet, he was walking on it but we refrained from chasing for several hours. Every time after that, when he got into mischief, he would sit there with that same woeful expression that only Shelties can conjure and hold up his right front leg, as though it were injured again, to avoid being chastised. One day he had knocked over the trash can and when I discovered it, he assumed the injured position except he was lifting the left front leg now. I laughed and told him he was favoring the wrong leg. At that, he immediately switched to the right front leg.
He would literally bounce of the walls if I mentioned the word "school" because that was his favorite chasing venue. I remember our last weekend. My house had just been built and I took my family and Andy over for a tour. He walked into the house and pranced around happily in the big empty rooms. By this time I hadn't lived with my folks for years but I would often dogsit with Andy when they went away and I always came over on Sundays for the family dinner and some play time with Andy at the schoolyard. It was Easter Sunday and I arrived early. We spent the afternoon running around the schoolyard and were both exhausted by dinner time. He had had this habit of coughing after a lot of exertion. The vet hadn't found any cause for it and he was otherwise very healthy so we weren't too worried. The next morning, he was gone. An autopsy revealed he had had a hole in his heart. The vet said the coughing was probably his way of clearing fluid from his lungs and he probably would wake from sleep to cough at night but that last night he was so tired from our epic chasing that he didn't wake up to cough. I expected a wave of guilt to engulf me but it didn't because I knew Andy had had one of his best days ever.