Limping All the Way to Five
Our first black Labrador Retriever, Blackberry, had health problems. He started having seizures between 6-9 months of age. We discovered that he had epilepsy and successfully treated his condition with phenobarbital for 9 years. The bad news is that it slowly destroyed his liver. We made that trade-off because alternative medications were much more expensive. So, we lost Blackberry when he was 9. I still think it was the right decision. Blackberry lived a happy life. He was the center of our family and even part of the community. Everyone seemed to know him. Neil was once exercising Blackberry in the Saco River in Biddeford and a school-aged girl with a fishing rod passed by them and commented to her father, "That dog's name is Blackberry." Neil had never seen that child in his life or since. When the UPS man would arrive at our house, he would hand us a package and look in through the door, saying, "Hi, Blackberry!" Despite this condition, he had a pretty ...