Bella

Bella is gone. This time the vet was able to feel a mass in her abdomen. It had probably been growing slowly since her weight loss started last year, and finally got big enough to make her too sick to eat. This was really, really hard.

Cutting for some details that people may not want to read:

Her veins were blown (they had a lot of trouble getting blood from her last week, which is why we had to go to the vet twice) and even with a tranquilizer, it took him three tries to be able to get a vein for the injection. He's an incredibly good vet, we've gone to him for more than twenty years now, and his hands were shaking a bit at the end of it. I was helping with two vet assistants and I feel kind of sick. But her blood test results showed indications that her muscles were breaking down, because she couldn't get any nutrition from the food she was eating, even when she could eat. So it was the right thing to do, it was just really, really hard.