Thank you, everyone, for your kind words and thoughts about Penny [View all]

Your posts on DU mean more to me than I can express in words.

Penny went over the rainbow bridge at around 11:30 am on Monday. My husband, daughter and I sobbed and petted her as she left us.

It's taken a couple of days to pull myself together to post this.

One lovely thing happened a short time before the vet arrived. It was gently snowing. Dave remembered how much Penny loved snow, rolling in it, jumping in it, eating it. He went outside and filled a soup bowl with snow. We held it up to her face, and her eyes lit up. She licked the bowl clean. He fetched a second bowlful, and she licked that up too. We were thrilled to give her this last treat, especially since she was refusing food and water.

After doing some research, I think Penny had degenerative myelopathy, the canine version of ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). It's genetic and there is no treatment or cure.

Here's a picture of her from September, 2023. She is wearing a flower headdress from a Ukrainian festival I'd gone to that day.