Young at Heart Pet Rescue

In Loving Memory of Mattie

May 28, 2010 – In loving memory of Miss Mattie May, our sweet, spunky, wonderfully mischievous, loving little girl.  She was approximately 10 years old when we adopted her 15 months ago.  She was the most beautiful husky/sheltie mix who showed her love by coming up and burying her face in our knees asking to be stroked.  She lived for food and would stop at next to nothing to get it.  She had been described as a heat-seeking missile for food and less than 1 week before she died she was still on top of her game having stolen a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from the kitchen counter!  But perhaps she was best known for her unusual quirk of stealing – and ingesting – socks.  Not any other small article of clothing, just socks.  Socks from the floor, socks from the hamper, clean or dirty, she loved to seek them out and walk around the house in front of us with them.  And initially she wouldn’t give them up so we learned (i.e., she taught us) to trade her for them.  A treat for a sock.  And it worked, but she would still eat them when we weren’t home despite our best efforts to not leave them lying around.

So when she began vomiting and not eating for 2-3 days we brought her to the vet.  X-rays were indeterminate.  Exploratory surgery revealed cancerous obstructions along her digestive tract which were already too advanced to be able to successfully treat.  The cancer had spread throughout her body.  They also found a sock which had appeared to have been in there for a while!  So we made the ultimate painful decision to let her go while still on the table, not wishing to wake her up, have her heal from major surgery, and then rapidly decline again anyway.  We came in to be with her as she passed.  She was sent to her rest with a sock wrapped around her right foreleg.

Even though Miss Mattie May was not with us for nearly enough time, the time we had with her was unforgettable and we would do it all over again in a minute.  These senior guys & gals have so much personality and so much love to share and we are so glad that she and we mutually chose each other, and our family will miss her terribly.