THE WIND PHONE
My Best Friend Died in My Arms
Medical negligence from blase veterinarians forced my hand in having to take my best friend out of this world.
It happened on the hardwood floor in our kitchen. With my boyfriend and family around, I nodded to the veterinarian that it was time. As I cradled his head in my lap, one hand on his heart and with my lips pressed close to his perfectly cropped ears, I repeated softly through sobs, “I love you, I’ll see you on the other side” over and over.
The vet injected him with the final drug.
I felt his last breath and the final beat of his heart and then he was gone. My best friend. The love of my life. My beloved Cane Corso, Leo.
Having to put Leo down was the hardest decision I have ever had to make. It’s one that to this day brings tears to my eyes, stalls my breathe and makes me question for the millionth time whether it was the right thing to do.
Leo and I had been through so much together in those six short years I could not imagine being able to survive without him. Many people will not understand the extent of my despair over losing Leo. I pity those same people because they will never know that depth of love.
Leo was born on January 4, 2016, making him only six years old when I had to put him down. I had wanted a dog for years but living in cities and in apartments made that impossible. The same month and year Leo was born though my now ex-husband and I had bought our first house, with a yard, so we could finally get a dog.
We had decided on a Cane Corso, also known as an Italian Mastiff, because of their temperament, intelligence and looks. I had fallen in love with Mastiffs after I dated a guy who had two Bull Mastiffs. (Frankly, it was harder to leave those dogs than him.) We found a breeder 45 minutes away in Massachusetts and brought Leo home when he was 13 weeks old.
Cane Corsos are no joke. They are not a dog for the faint of heart. Remember the scene in Game of Thrones when Ramsey is eaten by his dog? Yeah, that’s a Cane Corso. There is a reason they were used in war at one time.
These large breed dogs were bred to be guardians of property and their people. They are fiercely loyal and love their people hard.
Corsos require an assertive owner who will spend the time to consistently train them. My husband at the time was working 12-hour night shifts as a police officer during the first two years of Leo’s life so the responsibility of caring and training him was predominately on me. I’m glad because it created a bond between us that was only broken by his death.
Leo weighed more than I did and had the ability to kill someone if he wanted to. Easily. However, I had that boy on lock. I brought him to training every week at the breeder’s house for a year. He listened to me. If I told him not to move, he wouldn’t dare. If I told him to come, he would without hesitation. I trained relentlessly with him. He would test me every day to see what he could get away with but by being consistent he became my loyal solider and best friend. We exercised every day and cuddled every night as my husband worked his miserable night shifts.
Leo was there for me in the good times and bad. When my then husband was in a near fatal motorcycle accident in October 2019, and suffered a severe traumatic brain injury, Leo was one of my biggest pillars of support. I had given my husband an ultimatum about his lifestyle two days before his accident. After the accident though, I was told by the doctors that I had to put “those issues on the back burner for at least a year.” So I became my husband’s caregiver, trying to navigate the landscape of brain injury and a marriage already on shaky grounds.
In November 2020, I left my husband after he committed two cardinal sins a marriage does not come back from. My mind raced to think of options of where I could go with Leo because my parent’s house was not an option due to my mother’s extreme asthmatic allergy to dogs.
I contacted my high school boyfriend’s mom, PA, who I was still close to and asked if I could stay with her for a few days. She said she had just sold her house but that the new owners weren’t moving in for over a month and I was welcome to stay there.
I vividly recall grabbing Leo’s monster face, looking into his eyes and saying, “I’ll be back for you tomorrow.”
And that’s exactly what I did.
PA and I lived together with Leo and her two tiny dogs in the house I spent so much time in as a teenager. I cried myself to sleep with Leo by my side. Even though I had no plan of what I was going to do when the owners moved in I didn’t care. Leo was MY dog and I wasn’t bringing him back no matter how much my ex-husband and his lawyer threatened me.
A month and a half later I moved into the house of one of my older brother’s best friends, B. It was our sanctuary in a storm and we started to live our lives free of fear and filled with joy again.
But our story together was coming to an end, and I had no clue.
For months preceding his death, Leo had been exhibiting strange but seemingly harmless symptoms and behaviors. Nevertheless, I repeatedly brought him to the veterinary clinic where he had been going to since he was a puppy.
He hated the vet but what dog likes the vet? Whenever they listened to his heart, the technicians and vet would say it was racing but always assured me it was probably because he was nervous. They never heard the heart murmur or if they did they dismissed it. Turns out, this was the first clue that he was suffering from congenital heart failure.
Then, there was the random hack-like cough he would do once in a while. Maybe a few times a week.
“Probably just dust,” I was told by the vet. “If it gets worse or more frequent come back.” It stayed the same frequency and at times weeks would go by without hearing a hack.
Next, I noticed foam around his mouth tinged with blood after he ran or played hard.
“He is a Mastiff so he has more drool than the average dog and the blood is probably from the tiny benign tumors on his gums. Remember we removed those six months ago? They are probably back and causing the bleeding,” the vet tried to reassure me.
In the late fall of 2021, Leo started to limp and wasn’t able to walk as far as we used to. I noticed that he had a lump on his front upper right leg. Terrified it was cancer I rushed him to the vet the next day. They drew a sample of tissue from the lump, tested it and concluded it was “just fluid”.
What the team of vets had failed to figure out was that the fluid was coming from his lungs. Leo was slowly suffocating.
“Give him a break from exercising for two weeks and see if the limp and lump go away.” I was told. It eventually did but he seemed to be less exercise tolerant and seemed like he was getting fat.
So, I brought him back to the vet.
“Because he’s a big dog so his age is not the typical seven years to every one human year. It’s more like he’s in his late-50s at six years old,” the vet explained to me.
I knew when I got Leo that he would not have as long of a lifespan as a dog of a smaller breed. I didn’t like the answers they gave me but it seemed to check out.
Then around January 2022, Leo slowly started to get very picky with his food. I thought he was just being a brat and stubborn as Cane Corsos will sometimes do to test their owners. The vet said this happens with age and they had previously said they wanted Leo to lose a few pounds. I felt uneasy about the not eating as much but their answer jived with him losing a few pounds for his health.
By March though, he had lost a noticeable amount of weight and his eating habits had progressed from eating dry food to flat out refusing food without something like canned dog food or chicken added to it. I had called the vet a few times about the weight loss and this gradual decline in food intake as they were the ones who suggested adding other things to his food to entice his appetite.
In February I went to Puerto Rico for two weeks with my boyfriend. A mutual friend stayed at our house to watch Leo.
About a week into our trip our friend texted me.
“Hey, I don’t want to freak you out, but Leo is not eating much and doesn’t want to go outside except to go to the bathroom,” he said. “I’ve been feeding him steak just to get him to eat and he’s been sleeping in bed with me every night.”
I cried my eyes out. I felt immense guilt for leaving him when I knew in my gut something was wrong.
When we got back home Leo had lost a noticeable amount of weight. The vet said to give it a week and call back if it progressed. It did.
One night while lying in bed with my boyfriend and I, he started panting as if he had just come in from a run. I put my hand on his chest and felt that he had a rapid heartbeat.
I called the vet the next morning.
The vet’s office at that point scheduled an ultrasound to get a look at his internal organs not giving me a hint of what it might possibly be.
In March 2022, I brought Leo to the vet for an ultrasound of lungs and heart. This visit was the culmination of months of vet visits with strange symptoms (and thousands of dollars) and the one when I finally got an answer of what was wrong with my dog.
I had to wait in the parking lot as the office still had strict COVID protocols. I waited for an hour past the time they told me he would be finished, calling them repeated and being told he was still not done. I decided to drive the ten minutes home to try to distract myself which is, of course, when they called me with his diagnosis.
I pulled over into a neighborhood down the street from my house and answered. I don’t know what I expected but it wasn’t what I heard next.
“Unfortunately after viewing his scans, we’ve determined Leo has advanced heart failure with a life expectancy of less than 100 days,” the voice on the other end said. My world fell apart.
Heart failure?! That was not even on my radar of the potential conditions he might have but whatever it was I was ready to throw as much money as possible at it to cure him. A dog can live with heart failure if caught early enough and is on medication. By this point though, it was too late.
I raced back to the vet’s office and burst into the office. Fuck COVID protocol I needed my dog. A technician brought me back but before I could see Leo, she wanted the vet to explain what they had found.
“You see the lungs should look empty and have a lot of darkness in them,” the vet said. “His lungs look like they are full of spiderwebs.” This is fluid backing up from his heart into his lungs.”
“Where is my boy??” I demanded. The vet silently led me to the back where he was contained in a large plexiglass room. He started to lunge but then realizing it was me stopped and ran into my arms. I sobbed into his silky black coat, rubbed a hand from his dangling jowls to his ears and said, “Let’s go home.”
I had to think about Leo and not just how devastating it would be to lose him. That would be selfish.
The decision to euthanize a dog with heart failure is a complex and individualized one that should involve careful consideration of the dog’s quality of life, the severity of the condition, and the potential for further medical intervention.
After Leo’s death through torrential tears and snot, I hysterically berated myself for not knowing what was wrong with him. That Leo’s heart would be the death of him.
“I killed my best friend,” I kept repeating through sobs. “How could I miss the signs? This was definitely my fault,” I would tell myself over and over internally and out loud.
Night after night for weeks I howled like a mother who had lost her child. All I could obsess about was the thought that I should have done more.
Some nights I woke up thinking he was still alive and would go looking for him throughout the house becoming more frantic as time passed and I not being able to find him. When I would finally wake up fully the reality hit me like a ton of bricks.
Even after almost two years my grief and loss feel heavy. This blog took weeks to write because I would have to stop because I was crying so hard. I do believe however that Leo held on to life until he knew I was safe and happy. He watched as B and I fell in love and I think he knew that I would be ok without him even if I didn’t think I would.
A massive portrait of him which I painted years before his death now hangs in our son’s room watching over him.
I point to it on occasion and say, “That’s your big brother Leo, Mommy loved him so much.”
I love you, Leo. I’ll see you on the other side.
