BEST. DOG. EVER.

Forget Ol’ Yeller.

Today we said goodbye to the best dog in all of history.

As you might imagine, I’ve had quite a few dogs in my lifetime.

I never had any claim to my sister’s first dog, Chico, a Chihuahua, whom we had when she was in the fourth grade and I was in the first.

I did claim Ringo, an English shepherd who was actually my Uncle Sam’s working dog. Ringo loved apples, and Aunt Polly and Uncle Sam thought it was completely unsanitary (and maybe a little insane-atary) that I’d take a bite, give a bite to Ringo, then take another bite myself.

My aunt and uncle’s dairy farm was on a dirt country road, and the dogs ran free because leashes are completely impractical on a farm. One day Ringo was crossing the road, as he did multiple times every day, and a passing car going 70+ hit him. He had a head injury and I assumed that was the end of Ringo.

Not so.

Ringo survived without sequella and lived years more.

I had miniature poodles in my late teens and early twenties.

Uncle Sam gave me a pair of Beagles while I was in my pre-veterinary studies. You can read about Sam and Blossum by clicking here.

I was never inclined to have a bunch of dogs at once, although, in the 80s Brenda and I did get up to about six cats at one time. We were on the verge of being crazy cat ladies.

Our first poodles were Pearl and Peyton. A local Long Beach “backyard” breeder and client, Mrs. McKay, brought me the sweetest dogs over the years and, when we were ready, she happened to have a litter. We picked out a female and a male, naming one after Pearl Jam and the other a historical Randolph family name.

We adored them and Peyton lived to 12, passing much too soon from liver disease. Pearl lived to be 18, succumbing to renal failure.
Many of you enjoyed the 2010 story of Willie coming to our airport, then our home.

Willie had a mostly problem-free life until, in 2022, he developed a cough.
I treated it symptomatically, but, it didn’t get much better.

I radiographed his chest multiple times, but everything looked normal. I sent the digital radiographs to board-certified veterinary radiologists, and they found nothing abnormal.

Finally, admitting that I wasn’t making progress, I took him to MedVet Mandeville (LA) and submitted him to the care of Dr. Jill Yates. Dr. Yates left no stone unturned.

Yet, every result was normal.

And, Willie continued to cough.

Periodically, I would hear something about his cough that sounded a little different, and I would take him to work with me for the day and take yet another X-ray.

It’s a wonder he wasn’t glowing in the dark by this point. Even Dr. Yates had radiographed him.

On the last of those radiography sessions I snapped the right picture at the right time and “caught” one of his mainstem bronchi collapsing.

Finally, we had our answer.

The airway tree in you, me and Willie is called a tree because it branches just like an oak. The trunk is the trachea (windpipe), and the trunk’s first branches are large before becoming smaller and smaller when bronchi turn into bronchioles.

Because dogs’ tracheas lack a full cartilage ring, they are subject to collapse. Where cartilage goes all the way around to form the “trunk of the tree” in people, dogs have a trachealis muscle that completes the circle just under the spine. In certain breeds, or with chronic cough, that muscle becomes flaccid, the trachea collapses or flattens, and the airway narrows.
A harsh, hacking cough ensues.

But, that wasn’t Willie’s problem.

Willie’s collapse was just beyond the trachea in one of those first branches.
Though medical and surgical management of tracheal collapse has been tried, nothing helps those patients forever, although many can be managed with cough suppressants and antiinflammatories, sometimes for a long time.

Mainstem bronchus collapse, however, tends to be much less manageable and courses of illness tend to be short before the coughing, gasping and wheezing are intolerable.

We were as aggressive as anyone can be with Willie’s cough management. Thanks to an old-timey elixir I first learned about in the 1980s, and nebulization that Dr. Alan Ralph put us onto in 2023, Willie went a little over 2 ½ years from the day of that fortuitous chest X-ray.

Ultimately, though, it was Brenda’s 24/7/365 devotion to Willie that accounts for his longevity.

We knew we would have to “make a decision” one day, because neither tracheal collapse nor mainstem bronchus collapse is ever fatal. The cough just becomes intolerable for both patient and owners.

However, Willie surprised us by going into renal failure just a short while before he passed. Frankly, we were relieved that we never had to make that decision.

Now is the hard part.

We will be a long, long, long time “getting over” losing Willie.

Willie was smart, alert, devoted and a great snuggler. He was pretty and handsome.

Korean pet owner Kim Seon-ae said of her dog, Dalkong: “He was like a virus that infected me with happiness.”

The same could be said of Willie, Brenda and me.

Best. Dog. Ever.