Buford T. Justice

Our English Bulldog Buford passed away today :(

Long story short, but he has been fine... actually better lately, due to the Glucosamine we've had him on, but Fri night he woke us up in the middle of the night w/ an awful howl/cry/scream--
nothing we had ever heard before. We couldn't figure out the cause, so we took him to the emergency vet. They diagnosed it as his knee (which had long term issues I won't go into now) and the fact that he probably had shooting pains or something. Gave him painkillers and he seemed to be fine... seemed to be fine all day Saturday, too but woke us about this morning about 4 am w/ the same crying. This time we gave him another painkiller and tried to go back to sleep but around 7 am, he seemed to be feeling pretty bad (lots of symptoms). We took him to this regular vet which opened at 9:00. He was acting pretty strange by now. They took him back to do blood work, etc and around 10:00 they came out and said he had stopped breathing and they had to inti bate him!

At least an hour later he still would not breathe on his own and was totally unconscious, probably enduring brain damage as he was not getting any oxygen through his system... The vet advised us to euthanize. He has seen the same thing happen 100's of times in bulldogs.

Essentially, it was probably something genetic that caused it and it is very common w/ English bulldogs to have horrible respiratory problems (hence the breathing & snoring, etc). We got to be w/ him when he went and we got to say goodbye, but he was not responding to us at all. I'm sure he heard us at least.

We are obviously heartbroken, but very glad he went quickly. We also spent all day Saturday laying around watching movies so he had a great day! Usually we are running all around on Saturdays... he of course, liked for us to be home, so he had a good last day. He was only 4 years old, though.

Keep us in your thoughts this week...along w/ Rosco. We aren't sure how he's going to adjust... then add a baby in the picture in a couple of weeks! He's going to have some serious life changes to deal with. Skippy kind of goes w/ the flow, so she'll be fine.

Here is a picture I just took of him yesterday cuddled up in his chair watching movies w/ us...