o'cockaigne

After a long deliberation and roads I decided to contact Luc Janssens again and ask him if he wanted to operate Cwillyaigne once more. She obviously suffered from her jaw. She often shook her head and while walking she often put her yuling in my hand, she could not chew a pensstaafjes or nibble on a cow's hoof. She wanted to play with Calhoun again and when Brandir was there she found that great! But playing did not, it hurt. Slowly I saw her go back mentally, she became less cheerful and enjoying a walk was no longer there. Very occasionally I let them loose in the woods, at the beginning of this year she also hunted but the last few months trudged them pathetically behind me. No, the fun was nice from there. That's why I came to my difficult decision, I knew the risks but had the utmost confidence in the Anubis team.

First a CT scan was made to see if there were any strange changes to the jaws and whether it was possible anyway.

This looked good and it was decided to ask human-oral surgeons if they wanted to perform the operation. The techniques and knowledge is much greater in human-jaw surgery than in veterinary-oral surgery. After a few weeks I was told that this possibility was open and the plan was presented to me. On the basis of the CT-scan, a metal plate would be made that would be exactly tailored and in the form of Cwillyaigne's jaw and again its own bone marrow and ground chips would be used to fill the open piece. It would be a long-term operation and certainly the recovering time would take long. I had to take into account that it would take about half a year before it was able to do everything again. Well, I would have liked it for over and Cwillyaigne too, I thought.

In my mind I saw her play again and run behind the lure. How else did it pick out!

 I brought Cwillyaigne to the clinic at nine o'clock, and after all, she was brought to sleep. I stayed with her until she slept and told her that I would pick up D'r in the afternoon again. The operation would take at least four hours and the doctor also clearly pronounced his fear of this long-term anaesthetic. I thought it was a miracle that she had survived the first jaw surgery (because when she had laid the very first time of her life under anesthesia was almost the plumb bob) and kept me from being stronger than I thought. The whole morning we were so tense as a feather but when there was not a call at two o'clock I was still hyper nervous.

At half past three the phone went…. And then the clock stood still.

During the last acts of the operation it went wrong. Cwillyaigne's heart stopped with it. During a thick thirty minutes they still tried to get her heart going again, but this did not succeed. Eventually they let her go.

We got her straight away and oh, what looked nice! The doctors had cleaned her yuling which made it clear to see what a half-timber was delivered. Her jaw was perfectly straight and you could barely see that she had surgery. I'm sure it would all have been good. But unfortunately…

We took them home to allow the other hounds to take the opportunity to say goodbye to her. Every hound reacts differently, but Amy, who normally doesn't show anything, was clearly very well-off. After all, Cwillyaigne was her favorite daughter.

And I, I must learn to live with it that I have made a wrong decision to let her operate again. Losing a hound in this way is really unacceptable and I still have an awful lot of grief every day.

Cwillyaigne is cremated and is buried next to her brother, Craffitsh, on our own small cemetery.