P is for "Pets"

currently we have the pleasure of living with three dogs; Modi, Matilda, and Mocha who make our lives interesting!

i've always loved animals and as soon as we moved away from my "grandparent"'s house, we had lots and lots of pets. my parents are very big in to animal rescue.

i got my first dog of my very own, a now 6 year old black pug named Modi, last year in may right before i graduated college. my mom and i had gotten to know a lady at our favorite coffee shop who sadly was losing her battle with cancer and needed to find a good loving home for her dog.
we had just recently lost our family dog to old age and it was pretty hard on us all but my mom especially was pretty devastated. she has always had a fondness for Neapolitan Mastiffs and with some luck we were able to find her another. while she was waiting for her puppy to arrive, i guess she was still feeling a little bit of the loss and so she decided that she would adopt Modi as well.

i went with her to pick him up from our friend and somewhere between there and petsmart he and i formed a very strong bond. he never went home with my mom that day. lol and he has been my lil' buddy ever since. it's amazing how much he seems to be in tuned with my emotions. before when it was just me and him, if i was having a really crappy day or lying in bed crying he would come lay with me and it always made me feel better to have him there.

in comes the new boyfriend and the new dog...

Matilda is a 3 year old mastiff that is 170 lbs of lump! she is the most lovable loaf i have ever met and is so kind and gentle you almost forget how big she really is! she goes nowhere fast and likes to spend most of her day catching z's on the living room couch. my partner Kc adopted her when she was a puppy from the humane society when she was turned in by her breeder. somehow when she was a baby she lost a toe and the breeder i guess had a hard time selling her and eventually decided to cut their losses and dumped her at the shelter. Modi and Matilda are quite a pair! lucky for us they got along right from the beginning and are pretty much inseparable! we like to joke and say that Modi likes big beautiful women! :)

our third and most recent addition is a long coat chihuahua that we decided to call Mochaccino (Mocha) in keeping with the whole "M" theme lol. we are not quite sure how old she is, but our veterinarian estimated her to be between 5-7 years old, which i guess is still kinda young in chihuahua years. Kc and i had just moved in to our new home. i had a break from work and we were trying to get me out of the house so we planned a day of running errands. as we were leaving Target, there was a small crowd outside of the store pointing at some car speeding off. normally i try to avoid strangers and drama, but we heard someone say "omg i can't believe they just dumped this puppy here and left!" and of course the bf and i couldn't walk away. so we went over to have a look and our hearts melted. the poor little thing looked so sickly! you could smell the infection on her and she had some sort of gooey stuff all over her bottom and back legs. there was some short debate as to what to do for her. should someone take her to the animal shelter or try and see if a nearby vet would take her and help her? in the end Kc and i decided that we would take her to our pet's doctor and kind of go from there.

when we got there the girls at the front desk took one look at her and said she needed help right away! after a few minutes, our doctor called us in and told us that she was pretty sure she had what was called a pyometra and that she needed to have surgery to remove the infected uterus. we didn't even need to talk it over. we told her to do whatever was necessary to save her. in the process, our doctor performed an ultrasound to confirm the diagnosis and also some blood work which included a heartworm test. i didn't know it at the time but our vet had called Kc to tell him that our poor little strayling was also heartworm positive and that this could complicate the surgery. he told her to proceed but didn't tell me until afterwards because he knew i would completely freak out with worry! i'm happy to say that she made it through successfully and after a few days care in the hospital, we brought her home with us. :) she is now a happy healthy little dog and next month she will undergo heartworm treatment. she is definitely not the quiet, sickly little pup we found lying in a box in the Target parking lot. she is now Mocha, chihuahua warroir! and all the backyard squirrels are shaking in their boots!