Share a story about someone who had a positive impact on your life.
What is your definition of ‘someone’? Because if it involves the word “human”, Rocky wasn’t someone, but regardless, he had a positive impact on the lives of my husband and me.
He was an American Bulldog, though our vet called him a “big ol’ pitty” because of his pit bull appearance. We rescued him from our local county shelter. Rocky was the name we gave him because he was a fighter. When he was taken to the shelter, by my sister-in-law who he had wandered up to at her school during dismissal, he was injured. It was apparent that he had been in some sort of fight. We speculated that he may have been used as a bait dog for fighting rings. In fact, we had to wait several weeks to bring him home so that he could be treated for his wounds and infections.
He was three years old and we quickly learned that he was deaf. Couldn’t hear a thing. The vet confirmed it when we took him to get established after we adopted him.
We adopted him in February of 2022. That was a very intense year for us. My mother-in-law had died the October before and when we got him, we were in the middle of prepping to move into her house that we had inherited. This was after my mother-in-law’s own dog had passed shortly after she did. Our hearts were broken from this grief. And then came Rocky. There is a reason he came up to my sister-in-law that afternoon. God knew that he needed someone to take care of him and God knew we needed him because our hearts hurt, and Rocky was simply a playful, loving 80-somethin’ pound hunk of dog love.
When we moved into our house, it wasn’t long before I discovered that I was pregnant. My husband and I weren’t trying, but we were happy that it happened. But after 8 weeks, our hearts were broken yet again when I suffered a miscarriage. Through that grief, there was Rocky. He was a quiet soul. His deafness prevented him from barking. Sometimes if we went beyond the baby gates of the house where he couldn’t see us (or hear us), he would whine. Sometimes that whine would crescendo into a bark, but very rarely.
He helped my husband and I heal. He gave us somebody to take care of. We had experienced three devastating losses in such a short amount of time that Rocky helped take our minds off of who we no longer had and focused us on him. He was the best boy. Seriously. He could be a handful, especially on walks when he knew how to use his girth to pull us where he wanted to go. Or when he would eat things that made his stomach upset. He didn’t just chew things, he swallowed them too. The emergency vet got to know him immediately because he swallowed one of my husband’s trouser socks and I panicked thinking it would damage his intestines. When the vet got him to throw up the sock, a whole bunch of soccer ball pieces came up too. With our backyard up against the high school practice fields, balls often land in our backyard. If the dogs get to them first, we don’t throw them back over.
That was just Rocky. And we loved him. But we didn’t get to keep him long. In November of that same year, he began having seizures. The kind that put him on the floor convulsing. Our vet put him on phenobarbital and that kept him from having any breakthrough seizures. We felt fortunate that he never had any issues with them once he got on the medicine. But it didn’t last. Just before Easter of the next year, Rocky had another seizure in the middle of the night. And he didn’t stop. He kept having them. My husband took him to the vet in the morning, the emergency vet had sent us home once he came out of one. There was nothing they could do. He had a seizure at our vet’s office and it was so severe that it just wouldn’t stop. They had to heavily sedate him to make it stop. There was nothing we could do to save him. If he came out of it, he wouldn’t have any quality of life. We made the decision to say good-bye to him. Yet another loss that we had to endure. We brought him home and buried him in the backyard with a lifetime of pets that had passed.
As hard as it was to lose Rocky, after he had such a positive impact on us, we know he was better off with us. He could have spent his remaining time suffering through seizures out on the streets. Instead, he lived a little longer with medicine and the love of two people who needed him as much as he needed us.
We have Millie and Ethan now, both rescues from the same shelter. Rocky made us want to help other dogs who had been strays like him. Both of them now carrying on the positivity in our lives that Rocky started.
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