Relaxed Joy (Important Edit)

The title says it--here's Joy II looking a little closer. He always manages to look so bright. Anyway, the picture may not look right, but whatever, Joy sure does!

PLEASE READ

This is very important for Joy. I have started a fundraiser. If you could help us out, we would be forever grateful to you! Joy deserves a fighting chance!!

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Please, please pray for our little baby... He's facing very difficult times right now. It's very frustrating and depressing for all of us, because... He was perfectly fine yesterday afternoon, and then...

Joy had super severe breathing problems yesterday. Seriously, out of nowhere he started rattling when he breathed. Very, very serious. He was just laying down on the bed, and then he started breathing like that. It was horrible.

I was working in the meantime...

But, anyway, we searched all over for an emergency vet and found one that charged us... Oh my god, I'm not even going to talk about what we were charged. It was that bad. Plus, he might have to stay over extra nights. ...We'll have to work forever to pay off that debt.

But anyway... Turns out the poor boy has some kind of heart disease. They're telling us that the life expectancy for animals like that is like, four years... I don't know if they meant four years from when the disease is diagnosed, or four years overall... Because Joy is around four... No--in fact, he's like five now... So... I guess they meant he's got like four more years...

...He was alright and next minute, he's having breathing problems that scare the **** out of us, and then he's being diagnosed heart disease, and we're getting charged a lot more than two thousand dollars that we have no choice but to pay bit by bit, and I do believe with some credit included. Thank God Mother has impeccable credit. Like, you haven't seen a cleaner credit.

...But yeah, we're having to deal with this... It's a humongous hit for everybody... It reminds us of our dalmatian dog, the one I told and wrote a journal about? The one that bled all over me while she agonized on our way to put her down? ...Yes, it reminded us of that... Because poor Joy was having such a hard time.

It seems he's breathing a LITTLE better right now, but they still don't dare pull him off the oxygen 'cause he's having like, 60 breaths per minute, which I guess might be like a lot, but he gets too accelerated... He's still not quite stable...

We're all so worried and praying as much as we can. As soon as he gets his medicines and a prescribed diet...

Since I work at Unleashed by Petco, side by side with a lot of knowledgeable managers and experienced people... Well, I'm going to do my contribution by asking my manager and coworkers if there's any alternatives for prescribed food brands by the vet that we might sell that have the same properties. See, I see this all the time working at the store:

Customers come with vet prescribed brands that either we don't actually carry (because our store and the location is so new), or we carry but are like, super expensive. What I always see that my coworkers try to do is recommend other brands that we do carry (to make sales) and actually have the same or almost the same properties of healthy requirements for a much cheaper price.

If Joy has any diet prescribed for him, I'm totally gonna ask around before we even buy anything. I'll even ask about the heart disease in general; maybe they can help. Those guys have been in the business for more than ten years than I have--except for Tim, our store dog trainer. He's been there for one year--same with Edgar, a sales associate that's also been there for a year. But, yes...

If you can pray for Joy, I'd really appreciate it. My sister has a lot of friends, and since she asked them all for an emergency vet place (we were very desperate last night), they're all praying for him, too. We really feel very bad for Joy, and wish that we could help him some more. We had to pay an additional $300 in case his heart stopped beating, that he could get resurrected, if possible. Apart from the $2000+ that we're already going to pay...

It breaks my heart that our problems are always money related. It breaks my heart that our innocent pets are the ones who have to suffer the most... At least us people have health insurance for the toughest stuff, but...

So, please pray for him. Please pass it on--we need as much help; prayers, work, good wishes, as possible. Thank you very much and may God bless you.