Forgive the quiet!

Hey everyone, please forgive me for not posting recently its been a crazy and long past few days. Between getting hit with another round of the flu virus, taking care of my health problems, caring for spike, and trying to get caught up in my college courses, I'm completely exhausted. At one point I think I even made a comment about how I feel like a mom with a newborn again! Yikes! In any case there isnt much new news to update you with when it comes to Spike. The eye drops aren't having much of an effect on his diseased eye that is now is blind, what that means is that it just continues to fill with fluid which causes the eye to sill like water balloon increasing the pain and pressure (hard to watch him suffer through!) The right eye (his good eye) is still disease free for now, thought without the surgery and proper treatment we're not sure how long that is going to be. He has trouble more so at night, when it comes to getting around. I blame myself for his unwillingness to accept that he has to do things differently now, we have seriously spoiled him more than I guess we knew we were! It's amazing though isn't it How quickly time escapes us, how fast things grow and change, how one minute you can think you have everything finally working for your, and then the next it all fall apart. I find myself thinking about every time I yelled at him for doing something bad or annoying, or the hundreds of times I've gotten up to let him out and stepped on every blooming piece of chewed dog bone piece I thought he managed to eat. I think back to two years ago, while my husband was on deployment, and it was just me and my son, spike and a handful of chattering parakeets to keep each other company in a new house, in a new place, where nothing felt familiar. It's always times like this that we remember things like those things isn't it? Right now the only thing I could ask for, is to get to a place where Spike is out of pain and misery, and we can begin to go back to some kind of normal routine, even if now we have to tend to a semi blind dog. It's been a little over a month since I started the fundraiser, and thankfully the funds we raised through a week or two ago was enough to cover the expensive prescriptions and eye care specialist appointments we had to go to. It got us through to when we got our final opinion, and the written cost sheet for his surgery. Since then, things have stopped, and I have to be honest when I say that my faith in raising the money we need to pay for Spike's surgery and aftercare is pretty much gone. We just cant figure out how to make more money than we are, when we are barely getting by on the military pay we have now. I made the mistake in the beginning of saying that Spike wasnt a Hero in the sense that my husband is through all of the wonderful things he has done in the last handful of years, but the truth is I was wrong..Spike is my sons hero. I was watching my teenage son lay beside his dog tonight with that sad face on. We can explain that these things happen all the time and that we need to be grateful to still have him with us, but it doesn't take away the fact that he still feels like he's been robbed... after all we've been through so much bad and lost so much over the last 8 years, we thought we were finally catching a break which would let us get ahead, and then get hit with this. But spike is a hero to my son, after all it was spike who 8 1/2 years ago bonded with my son and helped him get through a hard family life that put him in the middle of some pretty bad things, and it is Spike who has helped to get him out of and keep him out of the deep dark depression he struggled with for so long. Right now they are curled up together on the floor, and even while Spike lays there crying in his sleep,its that teenage arm wrapped tightly around him, that has me sitting here in tears. I dont know how many of you have read to this point, or how many of you have followed this story from the beginning, or how many of you even care...lord knows there are some greedy and twisted people in this world who find ways to pull on your heart strings and work the system to get what they think they deserve..but if you have ever had children and ever had a pet you loved like a child you get what im saying, and what im feeling. And if there is any of that same love and compassion still in your heart and you can afford to donate even just $1, the difference you would make for my son and for Spike is far greater than you could ever imagine. Ive called all the numbers I can search for and find, and written to every news and newspaper and radio station I can to help get our story out there, and I'm just out of energy and faith. Anyways I have a nutrition paper to write and turn in, so i can spend the weekend writing two 4 page papers for another nutrition class and my psych class..god bless you and yours...Amy