Iris

Anna tells the story of a very special girl named Iris. 

Dead Pets is a podcast about pet grief that celebrates the lives of the creatures that have changed ours.

For more information www.deadpetspodcast.com.
Do you have a dead pet you'd like to share? Email deadpetsofficial@gmail.com. 
Follow us on social media: 

Transcript

Dead Pets Podcast - Episode 1: Iris

Welcome to Dead Pets, a podcast about pet grief that celebrates the creatures who have changed our lives and left this mortal coil. I'm your host, Elyse Wild. This is our very first episode.

I've been thinking about doing this show for a long time. One of the biggest emotions I felt as a child was grief from the loss of pets—a lot of pets. Our house was full of dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, lizards, birds.

 At one point we had 25 cats, including kittens. It was very chaotic, but I loved each and every one of them, and they all met their end in various ways. My lovebird, Gus, fell into the toilet and drowned. My favorite cat, Cisco, died while sleeping in my bed. One of our dogs was hit by a car.

Their deaths devastated me, and I felt a deep sense of loss with all of them. The pages of my childhood journals are full of entries trying to make sense of their deaths. Now, as an adult, I have a 19-year-old cat, a seven-year-old cat, two dogs who are 5 years old. They are my family, and I sometimes feel overwhelmed with the heartbreaking reality that they will not live forever—that one day it will be like they disappeared, the only evidence of their lives the enduring pain in my heart.

I've been afraid of fully diving into this show, afraid that it will be too painful a path to walk down, too many sad stories to hear. But isn't that what ultimately keeps us from talking about the uniquely painful loss of a pet? And that's something I want to make less painful, less terrifying, less lonely.

Being loved by a pet is just fucking magical. This podcast is about dead pets, yes, but more than that, it's about the lives of our pets. The stories we are bringing to you this season have given me the gift of knowing that I will survive the loss of my pets, that each crushing heartbreak is the trade-off for the incredibly fulfilling love that they give me, and I would choose that over and over again.

Each episode, you'll hear from guests about a pet from their past. We'll talk about why we loved them, why it hurts so bad when they're gone, how they changed us, how we carry them with us, and all of the joy and meaning they brought with them in their short lives.

On today's episode, Anna will take us through her journey with a very special girl who stole her heart: Iris, otherwise known as Iris Ruth, aka the Notorious IRP, the one and only Iris the Virus.

Anna: Iris — I called her I — was like a super mutt, but she looked like a pit bull, a brindle and white pit bull. And she had a head that was too small for her body and these little tiny Dorito ears. But whenever people asked me what breed she was, she was 2% Sheltie. And if you have a pit bull, whenever someone asks you what breed they are, it's not because they're excited. So I would just tell people she was a Sheltie mix.

She was a hot mess, but she was my hot mess. She was at the shelter in Muskegon, and someone had bought her to teach their—she was about six weeks old—to teach their aggressive dog to be dog-friendly. The dog bit her neck. And fortunately, a friend of whoever bought her off Craigslist stepped in, took her, and made sure she made it safely to the shelter.

I went to the shelter to meet a different dog to foster. One of the staff who worked at the shelter was like, "Did you see the little tiny puppy in my office?" And I mean, she was like six pounds. And I went in to meet her, and she was just sitting in a crate in the shelter because she was way too young, and she had like bite wounds on her neck. And I felt bad. I'm like, "I don't know which one to take." And I'm like, "I should probably take the older one. They have a harder time getting out of here."

And they were like, "Actually, can you take her? Because she is so young, we don't like them in here unvaccinated. It's safer for her at your house. You could start working on all the stuff. You can be pickier about where she goes."

So I took her, and I got her home, and she had a cough. And I thought it was from the neck injury, and she had like this pocket, like this bulge—like almost like a frog—on her neck that my friend Stephanie noticed on the way home. So I got her into the vet, and they determined her ribs were bruised, her lungs were bruised, and her neck had the bite. And then they thought she had kennel cough.

So I was like, "Okay, I'll nurse her back, get her up for adoption." She was the cutest puppy you've ever seen. Like, she'll be out of here in three to four weeks when she's healthy and I can get her spayed. We'll get her adopted. And that didn't happen.

So, I mean, I work full-time. At that point, I had Stanley—I only had Stanley, my older dog. He was about three at the time, and he is a puppy whisperer. Puppies love him. It was February of 2022, so the world was still kind of half shut down. I was working from home mostly, but, you know, busy. I'm very active in the rescue that I foster for.

She was puking a lot and she was having trouble with her breathing, but we thought it was all related to that bite. We were concerned that she had a tear in her trachea. We were at the vet a lot for the wrong thing. 

Well, she had been in a couple of times, and thankfully, they diagnosed her with pneumonia right away, so she started on antibiotics right away. Had she not left the shelter, she would have died, and they wouldn't have known. There's no way they could have known. They would have thought it was kennel cough.

So we had gone back and forth, and then I was like, "Something is not right. She's not gaining weight. She's puking." So I called it. I'm like, "This is a puppy losing weight, and if anyone can make a puppy fat, it's me, and she was losing weight."

So I got her the first appointment, and then I couldn't take her because I had a hearing—a court hearing at work—that I couldn't miss. So I sent out a message to the volunteers in the rescue and said, "Can someone just run her in for this appointment? They'll probably change her antibiotic, take some X-rays. I'll give you the code to my house. Ignore the large pit bulls in the living room. Just grab her and go."

So Sean, my friend Sean, said, "Sure, I can do that." So he actually got her diagnosis. So I was at work, and he texted me and was like, "Hey, Iris has megaesophagus." And I was like, "Hahaha." And I didn't really know what it was. Like, I knew they sit in chairs to eat. And then I was like, "Are you being serious?" And he was like, "Unfortunately, yes, and her pneumonia was from—she had aspirated into her lungs."

So I started Googling megaesophagus, and then went sobbing into my friend's office next door about how she was going to starve to death and this was the worst thing ever.

Basically, I learned this with her: the way your esophagus works is that it closes to push food down into your stomach. Like, it contracts. The muscles contract to push food down into your stomach and then keep it there. So Iris's didn't contract. So when you put food into her esophagus, it just either stayed where it was or it would come back up. So food, when you put it in, would just get stuck here, and then eventually would come back up.

But they don't throw up—they regurgitate. So there's no, like, the noise that wakes you up in the middle of the night. It's just like, all of a sudden they're standing there and it comes back up. The risk is that A, they're not getting any nutrition, but B, that it goes back into their lungs and they get aspiration pneumonia, which is what she had when she came from the shelter. She didn't actually have bordetella. She had aspiration pneumonia.

So that's what I was reading about—how she's not going to be able to—and then they're like, "But some dogs just need to eat out of like a raised bowl, or some dogs can't have water." But it's like, as extreme as her case was, she was very extreme. So she couldn't drink water. But it's like you're reading this whole spectrum, and then it's like, "It can be caused by several diseases, and one is treatable by surgery, and the other is myasthenia gravis, which is also not good."

So I just kind of spiraled at work, and I'm like, "I just gotta go home."

So she was still—like, an active—she was sick, like really sick, but she was still really active, playful puppy. It was the winter. It was so cold, and she would love to go roll in the snow with my dog. She raced around the house with my dog. She was like great at potty training. She had all these great things. So, you know, I am like, "Well, hopefully it's the issue with the heart that can just be repaired and the megaesophagus will resolve itself, and then I can get her adopted."

And I think it's like 15%—maybe less than that—cases of puppy megaesophagus resolve on their own. So maybe it's smaller than that. But it was like, "Maybe."

The rescue that I foster for is actually very medically responsible, so they spent a lot of money to get an MRI and some X-rays, and they paid for the testing, which is about $400, to see if she had myasthenia gravis. Turns out she had none of those things. She just had really bad megaesophagus, and she had another thing called esophageal diverticulum, which was what that pocket was on her neck. So basically she had like a pocket in her esophagus, too, that like, when food would go down, it would kind of get stuck there until it just kind of worked its way back.

So I start joining all these groups to learn about like how to help her and what to do. And I'm like, "Okay, there's some mild stuff." Like putting a slow feeder on like a stool—like for some dogs, that's enough, or just making sure their water bowl is raised. That was not enough for Iris.

So Iris had to eat—it took about two weeks to figure out, like, kind of work it out. Iris had to eat sitting up, and she could not have water at all. She was still tiny, right? And they eat in these things called a Bailey chair. And there are these handmade chairs that they go in. She would take medication that she would have to take 15 minutes before she ate, and she'd have to be sitting up when she took that. Then she'd eat her food, and then she'd have to be sitting up for another 30 minutes after that, and then she could get down, because basically, you're using gravity to get her food to where it needs to go.

And she took, actually, Viagra, because it would open up her esophagus. So it was working for her food to go in, and then it would close it. And so then it would wear off, and then her food—I'd feed her, and then it would close again, the idea being that it keeps it in there.

She was growing so much. And so to build a chair like that, if you buy them, they're like four or $500. But like in the groups, people who would lose a dog with megaesophagus would donate their chairs, that sort of thing. So it's basically like a wooden box with a door that she would back into and then sit up on her hind legs, and it has a tray in front of it that she can rest on. And I'd like put some padding in it and stuff for her.

But in the beginning, it was just a car seat, and she was little enough that I could feed her. I would just tell her, "Meatball, meatball. Car seat, Iris," and she would jump right in her seat. And it had a cup holder, and she would use her little paw to hold herself upright while I fed her.

And you had to feed her meatballs. So I would have to take her food, put that in the blender. And she can't drink water, so I would have to measure to make sure she got enough water for the day and add that to her food to make meatballs, so that they'd be heavy enough to sink when she ate. And then I would have to make Jell-O for her as her—whatever water she didn't get through her meatballs.

And you have to give her medication, but she can't take medication with food, right? So you can't put it in cheese, and you can't pill her because it's not going to go down. So I would put it in a whipped cream can, like literally like a whip-it, and just spray it into her mouth.

So you put her in the chair and give her the food, and then I'd hold her—when she was really little—for 30 minutes, hold her upright. Then after that, she got her chair. And we just got one someone donated to us, because again, she was still growing, so I didn't want to spend a ton of money on something that wasn't going to fit her. And at this point, I'm thinking she's still going to be adopted. We've got this under control. I've seen dogs with megaesophagus get adopted.

So she would—it sat in our kitchen. It was this giant, ugly wooden box. And you'd tell her—we always called it "meatball car seat," even when she switched to her chair. So you just tell her, "Meatball car seat, Iris," and she'd run over and jump in and then pull the door shut and you'd latch it in.

There were a couple times she jumped out of it. And then my other dog, Stanley—like I'd put his food down, put her in her chair, he'd eat, and then I'd feed her. It was chaos.

At that point, I had figured out if she licked snow, she would regurgitate. And the other thing is, she puked like 10 times a day, and it smelled so bad. And so you just start doing constant laundry. Like, in the beginning, I'd be like, "Oh, there's a little bit of regurgitation. I need to wash that blanket." And then after like a month, you're like, "That's fine. I can wipe that off. That's not enough."

I would keep layers of blankets on my bed, because if she regurgitated in the middle of the night, then I could just throw that blanket into the hallway and deal with it in the morning. But like, you'd be walking and she'd just like puke down the side of the couch, or she'd be behind me and she'd just literally like puke down my back.

So constant laundry. If she licked snow, she would regurgitate. If there was like rain and she licked dew off of grass, she would regurgitate. And every time, that's a risk for pneumonia. Every time she throws up, that's a risk for pneumonia that she's gonna die from.

So I was like, "I just don't trust anybody to—" She loves those things. Of course, she only wants—all she wants to do is lick grass and eat shit. She loved to eat Stanley's shit. I'm like, "Not only is that disgusting, it's gonna kill you."

My friends always joked that she was actively trying to kill herself. Like she would turn the stove on. I had to get toddler locks for the toilet seat because she learned how to open the toilet seat to get drinks. She learned how to open the front door, like unlock it and open it. I was like, "Why am I working so hard to keep you alive, and you're actively trying to kill yourself?"

Oh, she was the worst. She was the worst.

We went to an event, and she was great at the event. She played with all the dogs. She was good with kids, good with people. I just was like, "I just don't trust anybody to do this, and we're already doing it, and it's fine. We can manage this." I adopted her.

And then took her to the vet to get some follow-up X-rays, and found out she had luxating patellas, hip dysplasia, and elbow dysplasia too. So that part was almost worse than the megaesophagus, because—and this was all before she was like six months old, so it was pretty severe for it to already be developing. But she can't have surgery to fix her hips, because when she sits, she has to sit on her hips for when she eats for at least 45 minutes, and she can't recover from surgery.

At that point, I knew it was just going to be managing. If her hips got too bad, if I couldn't manage pain on her hips, like there was no fixing it. It was like, "Is she gonna die from the megaesophagus, or is she gonna get so painful that I have to make a tough decision?"

Her vet was amazing, though. Amazing. Her name's Dr. Hagen at Family Friends. And I had never met her before. She was just who was available when Iris first came in, and I thought had kennel cough. She was so fantastic. Like, she didn't know a ton about megaesophagus, but she also knew that I was learning too, and she really like kind of honored my experience and would work with us on stuff, and was willing to try stuff and like—spaying her was a whole thing, because she can't like lay down.

Oh, that's the other thing. She had to wear a donut all the time to keep her head elevated a little so that anything coming up would go back down. So like, she had to wear a donut during her spay and all that stuff.

So Dr. Hagen was amazing. Like when she got spayed, her uterus was in the wrong place. And the doctor was like, "Of course it was." She's like, "Her ovaries, one was way high up." She's like, "I had to like fish around forever." I'm like, "Of course it was." She's like, "Yep, of course it was."

She just—she didn't know anything was wrong with her. She was down for anything. Like, she was like, "Let's play." She was cuddly. She loved toys. She just was—she was really smart, like in all the worst ways.

Training with her was really fun. It was hard because it was figuring out what you could use for treats. It was whipped cream. We just used whipped cream in a can. She was great with my dogs. She was great with kids. She was good in her kennel. She was just a really good dog, and she was still so young.

I'm insane, and I love adolescent dogs that are just naughty and get into stuff. Like, that's my favorite stage. And she was just a riot. And Stan loved her. They would play and play and play and play. She loved going for car rides. Loved it.

She wore a donut all the time. Like she never wasn't wearing her donut. She had like fashion donuts, like all different kinds. She had a shark one, a cowboy hat one, she had a hamburger one. She had all kinds of them. And she'd just stick her head at him. She knew it.

So she was so naughty. So she literally—this is the grossest story. She loved to eat Stanley's poop, like while he was pooping, would try and get it out of him while he was pooping. It's gonna make me gag. But like, there is nothing grosser—nothing grosser—than regurgitated, warm shit. You cannot even imagine the smell. I'm a sympathy puker.

So like, you'd see her—Stan would be on one side of the yard pooping. I don't have a big yard. And you'd see her in the corner, and she'd look at me, and she'd look at him, she'd look at me, she'd look at him, and then she'd race over there. And I'd be like, "Iris, no!" And then Stanley thought I was mad at him, so he would stop pooping, and then he would refuse to poop if we were outside. So then I'd have to bring her inside, have him go to the bathroom. Then I have to go back outside and find where he pooped and pick it up. It was the most absurd thing.

My front door is like a lever handle for the storm door, and it opened out. And so one time, I'm, you know, in my living room, and I look out and I see a dog across the street. And I live like on a side street, but off a pretty busy road. And I look across the street and I'm like, "That dog looks like—wow. That dog has a donut that looks like Iris's." I was like, "That's fucking Iris across the street."

So I opened the door and like, "Iris, get in the house." She comes right over. So I'm like, "I thought she got lucky, like jumped up and pushed it because it opened out." So then I just hit the lock underneath it. There was like a little lever lock.

Like two minutes later, I see her over there using her paw to move the lever down and then smack the door down and go out. And I'm like, "You little fucker." And so then I had to get a toddler lock, like so that she couldn't pull it down.

And I still thought it was—she was getting lucky. So we're at the vet like a couple days later, and the doors open in there, but they have those levers. And I see her—she's standing up looking out the window. She loved the vet. It was her favorite place to go. And so I see her pull down on the lever with both paws and then back up to open the door. I go to walk her ass out into the lobby.

She just was hilarious. She was hilarious. But I was like, "Why are you wrecking everything?"

So my dad and I built her a new chair, a new Bailey chair. So it was a Monday, and Iris was always, always, always excited to eat. Always, always, always excited to eat. And I went to feed her breakfast, and she had won her meatballs. And she also took omeprazole, like an antacid every day, because that stomach acid doesn't move through like it's supposed to. So one of the complications with megaesophagus is like that acid can just sit in there and cause like real problems.

So she didn't eat her breakfast. And I was like, "Well, that's weird." But she was still like playing and spunky, and she'd eaten fine the night before. And I'm like, "You know, maybe she just has an upset stomach."

So I went over and I spent the day at my dad's. My parents lived nearby, and we built a new chair for her. 

My friend Rachel had painted this unicorn. We called her the Notorious IRP. Her name was Iris Tequila, so we called her the Notorious IRP. She was going to paint the chair for her, and it had like a rainbow and a unicorn, and it was going to be like obnoxiously Lisa Frank-inspired. And I had this holographic fish scale padding that was going to go inside of it—vinyl.

And I went home at lunch to check on her, and she was playing with Stan and stuff. And then I came home afterwards, and I put the new chair in the kitchen. And it didn't have padding in it yet, so we didn't use it. I just used our old one still. And she didn't eat again.

And so our vet has urgent care, thank goodness. So I called and they got her in for a 9:30 appointment. I went in and like, she was just laying on the floor. And normally she's all over the place at the vet, because she loves it there. She loves it there.

The vet came in and they were like, "We're going to take X-rays." And she was being treated for like a mild case of pneumonia, because she had had X-rays on her hips a couple weeks ago and had regurgitated during that process. I was like, "I really don't want her sedated because I don't want her laying down, you know, like I don't want her to regurgitate."

And she was like, "I think I can get them without sedating her." I was like, "I'm sure you do think you can. Best of luck to you." But she did. Iris spelled that shitty. And she came back in and she's like, "So I have never seen megaesophagus this bad. I thought it was her stomach, because there was so much fluid built up in her esophagus." And she's like, "And not only does it not close, it's like wavy where it's not supposed to be."

So, "You got to get that out of her." But there's no way to do that, because she can't throw up. And like, she's not—first of all, it's not good for her to swallow that. But even if she could, she can't. Like she can't.

So there's one medicine that like opens the valve to the stomach, and one medicine that closes the valve to the stomach. And I knew it was kind of like a last-ditch effort. Like it was really just to get her through the night. Because she was like, "You can take her to Michigan State." But she was already having a lot of hip pain. She was only 10 months old. I got her in February of 2022. She was six weeks old, and this was the end of October of 2022. She was already having a lot of pain from her hips.

So I was like, "I'm not gonna do surgery, because then I'm just extending—like, if this is it, this is it." But I really wanted to get her through the night so that we could do the hospice euthanasia at home.

We got home about 11 o'clock and I tried—the goal was to like try the med that opens up her stomach, have her sit in her chair, and then like see if we could get some stuff to drain through, and then give her the med that closes her stomach. I couldn't get her to take the meds. And as soon as I gave her the meds, she actually did throw up, which she never did. She regurgitated all the time, but she didn't throw up. And it looked like a little—like it had a little blood in it. And I was like, "Shit."

So I was like, "Just, you know, we got to make it through the night." And at about 2:30, she woke up and she just threw up what I could only—it was like congealed blood is basically the only thing I could describe it as. And so like, making her wait would have been about me. So I just put her in the car, and we went to the emergency hospital.

And they were fantastic. I held her, you know, sat on the floor with her. When they went to move her, I went to pet her one more time, and she was like, "You might not want to put your hand under her," like she was covered and like blood had started to come out. Like all of that that was in her had started to come out.

And I had been very fortunate up until that point. My prior dogs had—I'd been able to do home hospice or home euthanasia. It's pretty shitty, leaving the vet without your dog by yourself at 3:30 in the morning.

Stanley was so depressed. He wouldn't eat. It was terrible, terrible. And then my life, though—so I had all this guilt about it, because my life got infinitely easier once she passed away. Like I was spending two hours a day feeding her. It took, you know, four hours a week to make her food. You know, she was literally a full-time job. You don't realize when you're—you know, when things happen gradually, you don't realize how much time it takes.

So then I just feel terrible that I'm like, "What do I do with all this time?"

She lived her life—like there was not a decision of like, "Is now the time? Am I doing this too soon? Is it too—you know, did I wait too long?" Like it was clear. And she was wild as hell until the day she died, and she felt shitty for one day of her life. Like she wasn't like hit by a car, she wasn't hurting, she wasn't suffering. It was so clear. It was the right choice, which was really a gift, because having had to make the decision for my other two dogs, it was a huge—like, there's no guilt about it, there's no wondering.

But the grief is so much different. Because like, you're getting ready with Frito and Rudy. Like I knew it was coming. I was like crying every time I looked at him, you know, like we scheduled an appointment, you know, you got to take him for the last whatever. So the grief didn't hit me for like a week, and then I was a fucking mess. Like a mess. Like everything made me cry. I wasn't eating. It was just so different than preparing for a loss.

I did all the wrong things for Stan. I always have a foster puppy. So whenever we had a foster puppy, when they would go home, Stan wouldn't eat for 24 hours. And so I was like, "I'll just get him a puppy so that he has someone to play with. Puppies leave my house all the time, right? So he doesn't know the difference." Wrong.

Iris died on the 25th and on the 30th, I got two puppies from Detroit—Jerry and Elaine. And Stan hated them. He wouldn't play with them. He wouldn't let them touch him. He wouldn't—like he growled at them. He snapped at them. He wouldn't interact with them. I just moved too fast for him. He wasn't ready.

So I was like, "All right, I'll get these dogs adopted. You know, sorry, Stan. I thought—you need more time." Well, then Jerry and Elaine turned out to both be really sick as well. So we had them for a little bit. They just had regular—they just had regular pneumonia. But so we had them for a little longer than we normally would, and it was fine.

I got some other foster puppies, but it was just different with Stan. But he hated Jerry and Elaine. Jerry got adopted. They were a fantastic family, but it just wasn't—they had a senior dog, and it just wasn't working. So they brought Jerry back. And when Jerry came back through the door, Stanley was like the happiest he's ever been. He hated Jerry so much when he was there, but he was like, "You came back!" And that was kind of the turning point for Stanley, was when Jerry came back. And they were inseparable, and now I'm stuck with Jerry.

She was just such an asshole, and I just loved her so much. But I know, like, I know it's like a kitschy saying, but people can do hard things. Like, if you would have told me that I would do that, I would say there's no way in hell I could do that. But having done it, I would tell you, anyone can do that. Like, there's parts of it that suck, but like, that's how life is, right? Shit sucks. And then you dig in and you get stuff done, and then you just move on to the next thing.

And I think it's made me more open to like—things won't always be good. Things won't always look the way you think they'll look. That if I can keep a dog alive with meatballs and Jell-O, like, how do you keep a dog alive for a year that can't have water? Like, I would have been like, "That's impossible. You can't do it."

So I think it's just made me realize, like, just do the thing. Just do it and ask for help. My sister, my sister is a saint, because you can't just get a regular dog sitter for Iris, right?

So my sister would come and stay with her and clean up her puke. And, you know, I'd make her meatballs. I'd meal prep her meatballs and her Jell-O. And my sister would do her chair and go out there to pick up poop so she wouldn't eat it. And like, people just came around me and supported me. And it was hard, but like, you just do it.

Elyse Wild: A lot of people keep like the dog's ashes on their bookshelves or have, you know—yeah, so tell me about that. Tell me where Iris lives in your house now.

Anna: Well, Iris lives on all the things she wrecked. But she also—when I was growing up, my grandma had like those canisters, like glass canisters with like little squares, and they have like the round tops. So those were on my grandma's counter forever, and when she passed away, I got those canisters.

So my dogs—I have three, four dogs that have passed, and there's four—two are together. So their ashes are in those, in their bags, but in those canisters. And then their collars are around them with their paw print.

And so Iris's collar said, "Bitch, please, I'm a unicorn." So her little pink delicate flower collar's on there. And then people made me the kindest gifts when she passed away, like drawings of her and paintings of her.

My friend Rachel did the drawing that she was going to do, the painting that she was going to do on her chair. My friend Kirsten did a watercolor of her so I have all of these amazing like, pieces of artwork. And I have a room where I keep all my dog stuff, and where the crates are and stuff, and all of her stuff hangs in there. And then my dogs, all my dogs that have passed, they're on a shelf that you walk past on the way to the bedroom. And I just touch each of their paws in the morning, tell them good morning, and touch on each at night and tell them good night on the way in. So she's with the boys.

Elyse Wild:  If there is an afterlife where we get to see our pets again, and they are actually waiting for us, if you get to see Iris again, what would you say to her?

Anna: I just hope she's swimming. I hope she's eating snow,

and I probably would be yelling at her for doing shit she shouldn't be doing, but I just want to see her being able to roll around in the dirt without a donut on, running in the pool, just eating treats. She never, ever got to have a regular treat. I'd love to feed her chicken. You know, I don't eat chicken, but I'd love for her to be able to just, it'd be great to just see her be a dog. She didn't know any different. She was happy as can be, but it would just be good to see her play and be a dog.