Donna

Hello everyone,

We said goodbye to our wonderful Donna today. She just couldn’t breathe easily any more and the last two nights have really been rough with restlessness, rapid panting, and coughing. She could not really get comfy. We would have done anything to make her well, but the lung cancer was too much for her in the end. She had a tumor at the site of amputation as well and it was growing quickly. Our vet said in all her years of practice, she has never seen one come back at the site, so she thinks this was a very, very aggressive cancer and probably chemo would not have helped. She was still her sweet self to the end and enjoyed one last car ride and a McDonald’s helping of French fries. She thought that was cool and practically jumped through the drive-through window because of the intoxicating aroma! I took one of the fries out of the bag and was holding it and saying to Eric, “Do you think it’s too hot for her to eat?” … when…. GRAB!!!! A needle-snout absolutely shot through the aperture between the front seats, snatched the French fry, and devoured it. Hmm, guess it wasn’t too hot for her. Such a funny girl! It made things really hard but we did not want to wait until she was in genuine respiratory distress. Leanne came out to the house and it was all very peaceful. One minute Donna was eating a treat and the next minute she was gone. We are very sad, but we both thought that for the first time in many days she looked like she was finally resting comfortably.

Donna arrived at our house on Dec. 17th, 2002. She was #02-145 and almost the last dog to come in during 2002. Kathy B and I were doing intake direction at the time. Donna was coming out of TLAC and had to have a place to stay, and I tried really hard to get the Luscombes, and then Brenda, to take her. (: No dice. So, I grudgingly said she could come here, but by golly, on Dec. 26th she was going to be waiting out at the curb with her bags packed & we better have another foster home lined up! Yeah, right. We all know how that turned out.

Donna was supposed to be “Lily,” but once we knew she was coming to my house, we figured the name would confuse our other Golden, Lulu. We had to come up with another name fast. Eric was getting ready to go to a meeting with one of his grad students, the redheaded Donna Hobbs, so when I asked for a good name for a red GR, he said, “What about Donna?” That’s how she got her name, and Donna H. became her godmother. Eric’s other students were miffed that THEY didn’t have god-dogs, too, and we had to promise them that if we got to name another foster dog it would be Wendy, Liz, or Greg.

Beth brought Donna here. That dog was wild! She dragged Beth to the door and then she ran around the backyard like a maniac. When I let her inside she charged all over the house. She actually ran across the BACK of the sofa. She jumped on all the beds and found a tennis ball to carry. She was so excited! But much to my shock she was very calm when I cut off all of her huge mats and bathed her. And after that first spree she never got on any of the furniture again except for the dog futon. She didn’t like the crate, but I gave my husband firm instructions that she had to spend the night there. Well, I got up the next morning and the crate door was wide open and Donna was sleeping comfortably on the living room floor. She had fussed and Eric just let her out! I opened the back door and she ran out and did her business. That was the one and only time we crated her until her amputation, and then we borrowed a huge Newfie crate from Marcy Van Brunt which was more like a little room. For a while we gated her when we were gone, but that did not last long either. She was totally trustworthy from the start and never bothered anything.

Donna loved toys more than our other two dogs. The day she arrived she selected a soft rubber squeaker hamburger from the toybox and it became her security blanket. She would carry it around and fall asleep with it between her paws. It was so cute. The only fight she ever had with another dog was with our day-care Golden, Dixie, over that dumb burger. After that I started putting it away when visitor dogs arrived. After nearly a full year it ripped open and wouldn’t squeak. Poor Donna sadly carried the carcass around. Kathy B to the rescue! She found a couple of burger toys and hand-delivered them.

Later Donna developed a real thing for plush toys, preferably with squeakers. One of her favorite games was to have us hide a plushie under a dog bed. She would pounce and pounce with her front feet until she hit it and it squeaked, and then she would burrow madly under the bed with her sharp nose and pull out the toy. I am laughing just thinking about it! She would put her ears forward and her front paws close together in the cutest way. She could squeak those toys for ages without stopping, preferably by stabbing them viciously with her snout. She seemed to be able to judge just when a movie was hitting its dramatic climax and would come in the living room and start chewing on a toy. SQUEEAALL!! …just as someone was professing undying love or confessing to a crime or whatever. We used to fall over laughing. She really went for the big toys and we would comb Savers for giant plushies. Then I would take squeakers from toys the dogs had torn up and insert them. Her all-time favorite was a gargantuan ladybug. After that got too ripped up Eric found her a huge bumblebee, and then a few weeks before she passed away we got a monster gorilla holding a plush banana. Even when she was sick she would go galloping to her box and get a toy for anyone who came to the door. One of her favorite things to do was get a toy out of the toybox early in the morning and then run into the bedroom growling and shaking the toy in Eric’s face to wake him up. We were so excited the first time she did that after her surgery! We knew she was on the mend.

Donna had lots of nicknames. We used to call her Pilates Dog because she could lie on the floor forever holding her head up like you have to do in pilates exercises, except she never seemed to get a stiff neck. Then we called her Pig Pen and Miss Frowzy and Groom-Proof because she really was groom-proof! She had cowlicks all over and no matter how you got her combed out, she looked completely tousled 15 seconds later. She was also called Woo-Woo because of her very distinctive yodeling bark. She had one seizure on April 1, 2003, and she went to Griffith and they kept her for observation for a few hours. I was out in the waiting room the whole time & could hear her barking. Dr Culp came out and told me reassuringly, “Peculiar vocalizations are not uncommon after a seizure.” I said, “Well, actually, she always sounds like that.” It was funny. We also called her Devil Dog because not only did she have two cowlicks that stood up on her clever head like devil horns, but she could just about turn her head around 180 degrees like the demon in “The Exorcist.” If she was in her Pilates pose and you walked by, she would slowly turn her head to follow your movement and just keep on turning it! Or she would tilt her head so far backwards that it was almost upside down and fix her brown eyes on you from the inverted position. It was such a funny sight.

Donna loved new things and places, like all Goldens. One of my fondest memories is how she learned to go down the slide at the schoolyard. She watched Lulu and was game to try but very cautious. So I sat down next to her on the low double kiddie-slide and she slowly, slowly crept down on her stomach. Then she was so proud and wanted to do it many more times! She LOVED car rides and even more so after she started getting tired so easily. We would go to a new neighborhood and then all three of us would sit on the tailgate and watch the scenery. Donna would look very happy. It was really bittersweet because she would give us a sweet look from time to time as if to say, “This is nice, isn’t it? Remember this after I’m gone.”

She was very observant. She saw how Dixie could insert her narrow nose in a tiny gap between the sliding door and the frame and open it with a snap of her neck, so she learned to do that too. She was the BEST dog at getting groomed and bathed. She liked water and if you turned on the sprinkler when she was lounging in the yard, she didn’t even move. She would just lie there and get soaked. It was hilarious.

One time Donna was the grooming demo dog at our GRR training session and Beth really spiffed her up. Whoa, talk about instant inflated ego! When Donna got home she pranced around with her nose in the air, lording it over the other dogs. “Ha! Ha! You unkempt peons. I have a Professional Paw, Tail, and Pantaloon Trim, while YOU have mop feet and uneven tail fringe. Ha! Ha!” She was such a character.

She was the most companionable of all our dogs. She was Eric’s study-buddy until late in the night every night. She didn’t like it if she was inside and I was outside in the yard when Eric wasn’t home. One time he got home and she was at the door barking to be let out because I was in the flowerbeds. She came running out and her fur looked so pretty in the sunshine. I said, “Donna, you’re looking very red today!” That became one of our standard greetings when she would come trotting into a room.

Last August we found out Donna had bone cancer. We thought it was a torn ligament but it was a lot worse than that. She was so stoic! Nobody could understand how she had been putting up with the pain. We had her left hind leg amputated and she never looked back. She lived just over 8 more months. On February 3 she was diagnosed with lung cancer and given another week, so she actually went about 10 more weeks past that, which our vet says is phenomenal. She made many, many new friends and admirers who saw her hopping around the neighborhood on walks or riding in the wagon that Cam loaned us. She was so brave and so positive. She never moped or sulked and she did great on her three legs. She learned to pivot around so fast your head would spin. If you dropped a kibble or something behind the dogs she always got it first because she would just whirl & twirl around on that remaining hind limb. “Accept no boundaries” was her motto. After her amputation we would put her tummy-sling on and help her up to the top of the play tower at the schoolyard and she would survey the landscape and bark threateningly at passing dogs. She never lost her little personality!

Donna was spayed when we got her; she had the Humane Society spay tattoo. She was housebroken and knew some commands and knew what toys were, and she liked and trusted people. She knew how to walk on lead, and instead of trailing it behind her when you clipped it on indoors, she would gather it up and carry it in her mouth. So somebody loved her and took care of her before she wound up at the shelter. I often wonder what happened and how they got separated. Anyway she did make her way to two people who loved her more than anybody else could have, so even though my heart is breaking, I am really glad we spent the past three years with her. She was a wonderful girl and we miss her so much already.

"While I am opposed to all Orthodox creeds, I have a creed myself; and my creed is this. Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is make others so. This creed is somewhat short, but it is long enough for this life, strong enough for this world. If there is another world, when we get there we can make another creed. But this creed will certainly do for this life." -- Robert Green Ingersoll, 1882