Lilly Zeman

Lilly in her short life touched so many people and family members with her outgoing happiness and friendliness. We still 3 months later don't go a day without talking about Lilly or saying "I wish Lilly was here" to do this with us. She truly was a great puppy and we were looking forward to a long life with her in our lives. We got Lilly from a Labrador retriever breeder who lived on a farm in Iowa in June 2006. She was just 11 weeks old when we got her and her small crate seemed so gigantic. She preceded to show my husband who was on crutches and recovering from surgery how un-housebroken she was leaving her mark all over our living room day one. All we kept thinking was that first week- what did we get ourselves into? How are we going to deal with this puppy? Now, all we can think is we wish we had 15 more years of Lilly.

We got engaged the month before Lilly arrived and had planned for her to be our ring barrier in our May 19, 2007 wedding wondering how we would ever get a friendly puppy down the aisle - not where to bury her. We didn't have a ring barrier in our wedding in memory of Lilly and my husband actually carried her blue collar and blue dog chain in his suit coat so that she was there for our special day. To this day, almost 3 months since her death, her collar is on his night stand so that she is a part of our lives. We still have yet to bury her ashes as we aren't ready to put her in the ground again.

In about Jan 2007 Lilly began to loose hair. Not just a little hair- like we were vacuuming daily and sometimes twice a day. We mentioned it to our vet and he told us it was because we were having a warm Jan. Our vet at the time was actually a high school friend of my husband so we trusted him. In mid Feb, Lilly was still loosing hair and began to have diarrhea. We brought her to our vet again, and he said she had some type of stomach bug and if it didn't get better bring her back. A week later, we brought her back again and besides the diarrhea she was having accidents in our house which she never did and couldn't sleep thru the night. My husband and I were rotating nights staying up with her. The vet sent us home with anti-diarrhea medicine and told us again if it wasn't better in a week to come back. In the next 4 days she was so sick and truly not breathing right that at night she laid on our cold floors panting away. We again rushed her back to our vet. The lead vet saw us and was concerned by her breathing and blue tint gums. He told us that he would call back by 3pm. He didn't- so I began calling after we sat all day waiting for the call saying she was ok. Instead I was told her liver was enlarged. They wanted to hold her over the weekend and run more tests. I didn't want her by herself and asked to taker her to a 24 hour place unhappy with the fact we had a sick puppy and no one was willing to really explore what was wrong with our puppy 2 days shy of her 1 year birthday. At this point, Lilly had been sick for 3 weeks and it had been almost 2 months since she had begun to shed. We rushed to a 24 hour vet office in West Islip, NY and met the best Internal Medicine Dr. who in less than 30 minutes at 6pm on a Friday night gave us the grim news. Stage 3 Lymphoma. She had very little time to live. We had called his parents to come and thank goodness we did. We couldn't even comprehend what this Vet was saying. Did we want to try Chemo? Do you want to say good-bye? The vet wasn't even sure she would make it thru that horrible March 9th night. He put her on a steroid drip and told us he would call in the morning. He called at 8am to say she was barking and digging in her crate and to please come get her. We were shocked and faced our playful puppy when we picked her up. We then began to give her a steroid pill each day- he told us to live each day like it was her last and we did. She was suddenly allowed on beds, to eat whatever she wanted, and basically we just had fun with her. In the end we brought her back twice to ask if it was time and each time we were told it wasn't. In the end it was incredibly sad to have to say goodbye but we were so happy to have shared the last month with her.

The picture we have attached is of her favorite game. Everyday, she and my husband played football when he came home from work. We even joked about filming her for ESPN. She loved it so much we had to hide the football from her when the game was over. She played football in the rain, sleet or snow. Just mentioning the word Football caused her to run to our back door. She even played and wanted to play in her last days.