Life Through Lynsey's Lens
A blog about travel, photography, and all the life in between
Life Through Lynsey's Lens
A blog about travel, photography, and all the life in between
A blog about travel, photography, and all the life in between
A blog about travel, photography, and all the life in between
A Race to Say Goodbye
Remembering Quasar, his battle with cancer, and my dash across the globe to be with him at the end.
I’m back—did you miss me? I know it’s been a while since I’ve written anything (life happens, and the last few months have unfortunately gotten away from me) and I definitely apologize for that, but I’m hoping to make up for that in the next couple of weeks with some great content that I have planned.
As my Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook followers know, I recently got back from an incredible few days in the Alaskan Arctic, and, while I am putting the finishing touches on that entry, I wanted to share a different story today.
Two years ago I lost my dog, Quasar, to metastatic mast cell cancer. Here’s the story of how I rushed across the world to say goodbye.
My now-ex-boyfriend and I adopted Quasar on January 19, 2015 from Poodle & Pooch Rescue in Orlando, Florida. After weeks of searching local rescues for the perfect dog for two college students living in a small apartment, we found a listing for a spunky rat terrier with a lot of personality. We immediately got in touch with the rescue, submitted an application, and, the next day, made the drive down from Daytona Beach to pick him up and bring him home.
We were best buds from day one. I made him a nice doggy bed and sat down on the couch to do some homework. Instead of laying in his new bed he jumped up on the couch and sprawled across my lap. He knew I was his new mom and he loved me immediately. From that moment on, he was always stuck to me like glue. We tried to get him to sleep in the crate the first night, as one should usually do with a new dog in a new environment. He wore us down within a couple of hours and was cuddled up right next to me every night for the next four and a half years.
When we first brought him home, we had noticed that Q had a swollen lump in his groin, and our vet in Florida told us that it was probably swelling from being neutered so late in life (he was 5) and not to worry about it. So we didn’t. At least not until we moved to Tucson that summer and our new vet told us that it was definitely not normal, and suggested a biopsy. Five months after we adopted him, Quasar was diagnosed with mast cell cancer.
Thankfully, two surgeries later he was declared cancer-free. We celebrated with a steak dinner and hoped that that chapter of his life would be over for good.
For the next four years Quasar lived his life to the fullest. He enjoyed walks in the desert, long afternoon naps, moving into a new house, hunting lizards and other critters, playing in his pool, and lots and lots of treats and toys. In 2017 he welcomed Steven into our home with open arms, and his cat a bit more begrudgingly. We adopted another dog, Kepler, in 2018, and the two bonded almost immediately—they were truly brothers from another doggy-mother.
I remember, very vividly, the day we found the lump that would ultimately take his life. It was late on a weekend morning in May, and I was wrestling with Q on the bed. When I flipped him over on his back to blow raspberries on his tummy, I noticed a decent size lump in his groin area that I hadn’t seen before. Fearing for the worst, I called the vet and got the earliest appointment available—I think it was a day or two later—though it didn’t really seem to bother him.
The same vet that had diagnosed him back in 2015 called me again with the bad news: the mast cell cancer was back, and the new lump was in his lymph nodes, which means that it had metastasized and was likely aggressive. “I’m so sorry,” she said, and until that point it hadn’t really hit me. “What are our options?” I asked, expecting another round of surgeries. But the prognosis wasn’t good once it was in the lymph nodes. Quasar started seeing Dr. Klein, a fantastic veterinary oncologist here in Tucson, who prescribed him with a chemotherapy regimen with possible radiation therapy afterward. Even so, the treatment would add only a year or two to his life, statistically. All we could do is hope and enjoy the good days.
Treatment was rough on poor Q for the first few days. He spent his first night after chemo in the emergency veterinary hospital. While chemotherapy is typically tolerated much better by dogs than it is by humans (they typically experience few side effects, and never lose their hair), the initial treatment had essentially caused the tumor to degranulate (freak out) and release a ton of histamine (the stuff your body generates when you have an allergic reaction) into his body. It was a scary night, but he made it through and tolerated treatment well for the next couple of months. We saw the oncologist weekly, and the tumor fluctuated in size: some weeks we saw a lot of shrinkage, while others had less progress, or even a bit of growth.
By late June we were beginning to see fewer and fewer results, until it was determined that the tumor was no longer responding and we had to switch to a new treatment. This one seemed to be doing the trick, so we headed out to Chile for two weeks as planned to see the total solar eclipse. I gave him a long, tight hug and promised him we’d see him when we got home. I promised him that we’d be there when his time came. He gave me a face bath in acknowledgement.
The morning of the eclipse, and the day that Q was scheduled to see the oncologist, my friend who was watching him called me with good news: the cancer was responding very well to the new treatment and the tumor had shrunk considerably. We continued on our trip, heading north to the Atacama Desert, able to, thankfully, relax a bit. Until the following Tuesday anyway, when we got the opposite phone call.
I remember that day vividly as well. Steven’s dad, the director of the SOAR observatory in Chile, was giving us a behind the scenes tour. I was standing on the service platform of this massive, research-grade telescope when my phone picked up signal for the first time all day and some texts started to come in. “Call me,” I saw from my friend back home who had taken Q to his appointment. Not wanting to lose my cell signal, I made the call from that platform and got the latest report: His tumor was much larger, and his prognosis was downgraded significantly, to about a week or two. It was terrible news, but at least we would be home from our trip by then. There was nothing we could do from the other side of the world, and they started him on a new “last-resort” chemo treatment that morning.
The next morning we were awakened by a phone call from Steven’s sister, who was watching the house and the dogs, telling us that he was in the ER with a 104º fever and internal bleeding. We needed to get home ASAP. Unfortunately, changing our flights would have cost a couple thousand dollars that we didn’t have. I called Delta in tears, explained the situation, and asked if there was possibly anything she could do to get us home sooner that would be more affordable. To my surprise, her response was, “let me see if there are any spots on the flight today…. yep, okay you’re all set.” She didn’t charge us a dime.
We scrambled to get packed, found a last minute domestic leg to Santiago, and flew across the world. After a redeye back to North America, a grueling five hour layover in Atlanta, and a domestic leg that felt about twice as long as usual, we touched down in Tucson about 24 hours later. When I turned off airplane mode I had an email from the vet saying that Q’s condition had significantly worsened over night, and that I needed to call them ASAP when I landed. I quickly got on the phone and was told that he was still with us, but I needed to hurry.
I told Steven, “I need to get there immediately. Can you stay and grab our luggage?” He agreed, and as soon as I stepped off the plane, I ordered a Lyft and took off running across the airport to the pickup with my carry-on camera case in tow. I jumped in the car, extremely out of breath, to a somewhat alarmed driver who asked if I needed to put my case in the trunk—there was no time, “we need to go,” I told her. We made a mad dash for the vet (and a big thank you to my driver for running some questionable yellow lights) and, once I had caught my breath, I explained the situation.
About 20 minutes later I got a call from the vet, “We’re losing him,” they told me. “We need to put him down.” I was waiting at a light half a mile away. I told them I would be there in one minute.
We reached the office, I grabbed my backpack, and was out the door before the wheels of the car stopped rolling. A nurse was waiting for me at the front door and we sprinted to the back of the hospital, where my poor, sweet puppy was already in respiratory arrest, gasping for air. They had an oxygen mask over his snout, and his eyes were wide.
I promised him when I left for Chile that I would be with him when his time came, I hope he was still lucid enough to see me and know that I was there. I promised him that he wouldn’t die surrounded by strangers wondering where his mom was. I gave him a kiss, told him I loved him, and the doctor put an end to his pain. I sat with him for about an hour.
Quasar was a really special, one-of-a-kind dog, who packed so much personality into his tiny frame.
He would never spend a night away from us. When he had surgery and wasn’t allowed to sleep in the bed (in case he jumped down and tore his stitches), he still wouldn’t sleep in his crate—the solution was to put the whole crate next to me in bed, and he laid up against the side so that I could pet him through the bars until he finally fell asleep. He always wanted to be as close to me as possible. I remember waking up one night to him trying to crawl INTO my pillow! When we went to the dog park, Q would rather sit next to me on the bench than run around and play with the other dogs. If I was working in the study, a bed on the floor next to my chair was never good enough—he had to have his own chair, so that he was at my level (or better yet, a bed on my desk itself). Some people will say that kind of attachment is unhealthy, but love like that never felt like a bad thing to me.
He chased the windshield wipers and tried to grab them (from inside the car). If you gave him a bone or treat he really liked, he could never find the perfect place to hide it—he would hide it, whine that he wanted to chew it, unhide it, whine that he needed to hide it, repeat. He was afraid of the noise that beer bottles make when you blow into them, and anything that was propped up against a wall (because he would bark at it, inevitably knock it down, and then run to me to tell me that it attacked him). And balloons… balloons had to be popped at all costs. He loved blueberries, but only if he caught them in the air. Once they hit the ground they weren’t worth eating. His favorite thing in the entire world was to play in the bathtub. If you ever couldn’t find him in the house, he would be laying in the bathtub pouting until you turned the water on. Every time we stayed in a hotel, without fail, the first thing he did when we got to the room was go find the bathtub and jump into it. Puddles in the backyard were no exception, no matter how cold or muddy. He loved to sit outside and try to catch the lizards on the wall. He usually didn’t succeed, but every now and then he’d get one. He would carry it around like a trophy until I finally managed to corner him and take it away. He knew all of his toys individually and by name, and if he wanted a specific toy to take to bed you had to let him go find it and get it or he would never sleep. A substitute was unacceptable. If you asked him if he wanted breakfast, he would throw his head back and howl—but only for breakfast. Oh, and he had to bark at his food bowl before every meal. He gave high fives and loved cat treats. He stole and ate fortune cookie fortunes when you weren’t looking. Not the cookie part… the paper part.
Quasar honestly talked to us. He told us things he wanted, he was stubborn and threw tantrums. He would tell us when he liked things, and when he really liked things. I’m still not convinced he wasn’t a person trapped in a dog’s body via some crazy sci-fi situation—never in my life have I met a dog that was so human in the way they communicate. We lost him way too young, he had so much life left to live.
If I had taken my scheduled flight home—or if any of my three flights had been delayed—I would have been too late. I probably wouldn’t even have gotten to see him… I would have been picking up his ashes. Quasar meant the world to me, and he loved me more than I can even put into words. I know that everybody says their pet is one-of-a-kind, but I’ve met and owned a lot of dogs, and Quasar couldn’t be described any other way.
I know that the attitude these days is that corporations don’t care about us, that Fortune 500 companies only care about making money and not about their customers. Airlines get so much bad PR every time something goes wrong, and people will swear them off based on a single news story. But after this experience I’m swearing ON them. I would gladly pay a bit more and give Delta my business, even if brand loyalty is mostly a thing of the past. The actions of that single Delta customer service representative—and the company that she worked for—made such a significant difference to me, I will remember it for the rest of my life. To the customer service representative that took my call: THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart. I’ll never forget you.
Thank you, Delta. I am proud to be a sky miles member, now more-so than ever before.
