Meet Mila

With this blog, we will give some information about heartworm that we hope will be helpful for dogs and people. We are also going to follow Mila's eventual heartworm treatment. So we thought it might be nice for everyone to learn more about her!

Right before Thanksgiving, 2010, a plea was sent out for a dog who was in need. It was an e-mail sent by one rescue volunteer to the director, who then forwarded it on to me. These types of e-mails go around all the time, usually with a deadline and a negative consequence for the dog if no one can help. It is heartbreaking because the truth is that you cannot always help. They often do not send them on to everyone because it is so hard to say no so many more times than you can say yes.

 

I read the e-mail, figuring that there had to be something special here. It was sad and also fairly common because life happens and upsets us all, people and pets alike. This particular dog’s person had been placed in a nursing home, relatives had taken the dog just in case her person would be able to move back home. It was eventually determined that the owner was unable to be on her own and would remain in a care facility. 

But for seven months the relatives kept this dog, then called Mindy, in a kennel outdoors next to their hunting dogs. They had made efforts to place her once and that had not worked out. Mindy sounded like your usual “you need to be smarter than the dog” German Shepherd. They were trying to do right by her, but were leaving over the holiday. That was the deadline and the consequence was that Mindy would be taken to their county shelter. 

It was not an awful shelter either, but as I read on, I found that she was almost nine, the same age as my own German Shepherd, Bella. Almost nine and in a shelter; I did not want to imagine my dog in a shelter, because of something out of my control. 

This dog had an unnamed eye condition. My own Bella has plasmoma, or pannus of the third eyelid, a congenital eye disorder. 

Then I saw there was an attachment and opened it. That’s when I realized why the rescue director had emailed the photo to me. The dog in the photo looked exactly like (how to say this nicely) a well-fed Bella. At Christmas. With Santa Claus. Oh my.

Mindy, now Mila

Bella (her former name Brandy)