To begin with, she looked funny. She was a “Chiweenie”: half Dachshund and half Chihuahua. Technically that may have been true but to look at her, you’d swear she was 90% Dachshund and 10% Chihuahua. And the 10% Chihuahua was all in her head, so to speak. The best way to describe her (which my wife Lynn and I always did for anybody who asked) was to say that imagine somebody taking a weenie dog, cutting off its head, and replacing it with the head of a Chihuahua. That was our Bella. And to complete the picture, the color of her fur was brindle, which is a sort of mixture of black and orange.
We rescued her in 2014 from the SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) who found her wandering around some neighborhood (they didn’t tell us which one or if they did I’ve since forgotten). They said she was probably about a year old and that she had been a stray dog for a while because her hair was dirty and matted with burrs & stickers embedded in her coat and she was so skinny her ribs were showing.
For those of us that have rescued dogs, one of the things that we would give just about anything to know is: What was our pet’s history before we rescued them? If only our pets could talk, right? They found Bella wandering around a neighborhood. If Bella could have talked, what would she have told us?
Would she have told us that she escaped from a back yard and was never found by her rightful owner? Was she abandoned? Did her owners move out of their residence, leaving her behind? (Which is only too common, especially with cats.) Being a pretty rare breed at the time with a pretty rare coat color, maybe Bella was stolen from her owner? The truth was, we would never know.
But as we took her in, housebroke her, trained her, got to know her, I came up with a theory of my own about what had happened to her. It was what I thought might possibly be her backstory once I discovered her personality. And I have to be honest, it didn’t put her in a good light. I also have to be honest when I say that for the first year or so we had her, I regretted getting her. I don’t know how my wife Lynn felt but at the time, if I could have done it all over again, I wouldn’t have rescued her. And believe me when I tell you I’m a dog lover.
Bella was our 4th dog (all rescues) in our 23 years of marriage (which is how long we had been married in 2014). And don’t get the wrong idea. The lifespans of those four dogs overlapped. We almost always had two dogs at once. When we got Bella, we also had Cheyenne (a miniature schnauzer) who we had to put down in 2016.
So what was my theory about Bella’s back story about what might have led to Bella being a stray, abandoned by her owner, and wandering the streets homeless? I could see how it was possible (maybe even likely?) that her owner may have decided they didn’t want Bella anymore. It could happen this way: She escapes out of a hole in the backyard fence and the owner just decides not to look for her. That was my guess as to what her backstory was but, of course, we’ll never know.
And I’m sure you’re asking: What was it about this poor little dog that made her so unlikeable? This dog that didn’t have a mean bone in her body. Nor was she anti-social (in fact, she loved people). It was simply this: She wanted your complete attention. No, that’s not it. She DEMANDED that you give her your complete attention.
So no matter if you were watching TV or reading or paying bills at the kitchen table, she wanted you to stop what you were doing and GIVE HER ATTENTION. So for example if you were sitting & watching TV, she would jump up in your lap and put her nose under your hand or scratch your arm with her paw until you started petting her. But even once you started petting her, that wasn’t enough.
She would put her front paws on my shoulders, or sometimes even sit on my shoulder (she only weighed about 15 pounds) and start licking my face and demanding that I give her my full attention. LOOK AT ME, DADDY!! LOOK AT ME!!! It was constant and it was annoying. I even started inventing strategies to try to combat her incessant neediness.
When she wanted onto my lap, I started crossing my legs to create a barrier so she couldn’t jump up (her little legs were only about three inches long so she couldn’t jump very high). But do you think that stopped her? Oh no. When she couldn’t jump up, she would then begin nudging my leg with the tip of her nose.
LOOK AT ME DADDY!! GIVE ME YOUR ATTENTION!! (nudge, nudge).
And she would keep it up until I finally picked her up.
I would even sometimes raise my voice with her, thinking she would get the message to leave me alone. “GO LAY DOWN!” I would say (yell?). She got the message all right, crawling away on her belly, turning to look back and giving me the most heartbreaking, wounded look you can imagine.
But then within two minutes, she had crawled back, nudging my leg with her nose again and lying on my feet. When I’d look down, she would roll onto her
back, start pawing at the air with her front legs, and let me know she was sorry. I would pick her up, start petting her (you couldn’t stay mad at her), and her neediness and desire for attention would become even MORE intense than it was before as she tried to butter me up so I’d forgive her for whatever it was that made me mad at her.
She was the same way with Lynn as well. But not as bad as she was with me. Since I’m the one who trained her and fed her and took her out, she was always “my dog” more than she was Lynn’s (Which I think is normal. Every pet has a member of the family who is their “real” owner—usually the person who feeds them and takes them out.) But she could annoy Lynn as well with her constant demand for attention. As far as Bella was concerned, we were both there for no other reason than to satisfy her requirement that the world had to revolve around her, or so it seemed to us.
Lynn and I came up with a phrase that we shared whenever Bella was demonstrating her endless need for affection and attention. As she was licking our face or sitting on our shoulder scratching the side of our head to be petted or constantly nudging the phone in our hands with her nose (Don’t look at that. Look at me!), one of us would look at the other and say: “It’s all about Bella.”
We would say it so often that we got to where we would just look at each other and say it in unison. And then we didn’t even have to say it. We would just look at each other and know that we were both thinking it. “It’s all about Bella” was said as a joke, of course, but to be honest, it was also said with an undercurrent of resentment. We never talked about or seriously considered getting rid of her. We never would have done that.
We just looked at Bella’s constant need for attention as an affliction that had to be dealt with. No different than after we got her, had we discovered that she had seizures or a congenital heart defect. Those were the cards God dealt us and we weren’t gonna return her for a newer model just because this one was damaged. A responsible owner takes the pets as they come, and loves them no matter how damaged they are. At least that’s what we told ourselves.
And then we made a discovery that changed everything.
We gave her what she wanted. We learned that if we gave her 30 seconds to a minute of our complete undivided attention, that was sufficient and she would calm down. She still had to be right there with us (or at least with me more than Lynn)—in the chair or in the backyard (she would always start barking up a
storm and throwing a huge fit whenever I left the house so I took her with me whenever I could) or in bed at night (where she always slept right up against my side). But after I had given her her few moments of complete and undivided attention, she would lie down (in my lap or in bed) and transform into a normal dog, letting me pet her or not if I didn’t feel like it.
And so what had been an annoyance now became an intimate form of bonding that I have never experienced with any other pet. If I had been a Siamese twin, Bella would’ve been my second head. That’s almost how inseparable we became. And that’s how well she had me trained. It was all about Bella.
Lynn joked that I should get one of those baby wrap carriers—those cloth carriers that mothers have that they use to carry their infants and which allows them to effortlessly hold their babies to their bosoms. Only with Bella, she would be facing out instead of towards me with her four stubby little legs sticking straight out and her little chihuahua head popping out at the top.
And to be honest, I wouldn’t have minded it. She became not only a companion but a presence that I started to rely on always being there. I could always feel her lying by my side while I slept. Or in my lap when I was at my computer or watching TV. It’s almost like she became an extension of myself and a constant in an ever changing world.
And she was smart. The smartest dog we ever had, I think. I remember that our big 56 inch Samsung TV used to sit on a coffee table about a foot off the ground in the living room. One night, with Bella lying beside me in my Lazy-Boy, the movie we were watching had a long shot of a dog run from the left of the screen all the way across to the right of the screen and out of the shot (the movie was in widescreen so it took the dog longer than you might think to run all the way across the screen).
Well, Bella saw the dog, perked up her ears, and jumped down to chase it. About the time she got to the TV is when the dog ran out of the shot. Bella paused a second, wandering where the dog could have gone. Well, she saw it run off to the right so she ran around to the back of the TV and looked for it there.
After about 20 seconds behind the TV and not seeing it she came back around to the front. She looked for it again inside the TV and, not seeing it, now looked behind the TV from the left. She kept looking behind, in the front, inside the TV, completely baffled how a dog she had seen a second ago could just instantly disappear.
I guess it’s debatable whether or not that’s a sign of intelligence but that’s how my wife Lynn and I chose to interpret it.
Another moment I’ll never forget was one time she snuck into the spare bedroom to eat Sock’s food (Socks was and still is our cat), which is where we kept it so she wouldn’t get it (She was very sneaky. If Bella saw that we had left the door open, she would wait until we went into the kitchen or not watching her before she would slowly start walking down the hall towards the spare room hoping we wouldn’t notice—which a lot of times we didn’t).
So one day I was looking for her (I think because it was rare when she wasn’t right there with me) and couldn’t find her. And then I noticed that the spare room door was open (which as a rule we kept closed) and sure enough, I looked down at Sock’s food dish and it was empty. And then I started to hear a thumping sound in the room. And that’s when I found her.
She was under the spare bed but not completely. I could see her tail sticking out from under the bed. And she had to have been lying on her side under the bed because her tail kept thumping the floor: THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! She must have been feeling especially guilty (and a little afraid of getting in trouble) because when I said to her “What did you do?” her tail starting thumping even faster.
She had other good qualities besides being smart. She loved people. If a stranger (to her) came in the house, she would bark up a storm at first but then her curiosity would win out and she would soon be sniffing their feet. And if the person liked dogs and would pet her, that person had a new best friend who would sit at their feet or even let them pick her up to sit in their lap.
Not only did Bella love people, she also loved other animals. After we’d had her about a year, we found a litter of kittens (maybe two months old) under the dumpster in the alley behind our house. We rescued them and let them live in our shed in our back yard temporarily until we could find them a home (which we did with all of them except one—Socks—who we kept for ourselves and, as I said, is still our cat to this day). Bella loved those kittens. She always wanted to be outside with them, watching them, seeing what they were up to. Playing with them. Never once did she display any mean or aggressive behavior towards them.
One night in October of 2023, Lynn and I were watching TV with Bella laying beside me in my Lazy-Boy as usual. I got up to go to the kitchen (I can’t remember for what). Bella jumped down and followed me, as usual. As I walked into the kitchen, all of a sudden I heard her start yelping really loud.
I turned back to see what was wrong and Bella was lying on her stomach in the middle of the dining room, her body straight as a board, and nobody around her. And she kept yelping loudly. Lynn and I were freaking out because it is a
really helpless feeling seeing your dog in terrible pain but not knowing how to stop it or even why she’s in pain. After about five minutes, she finally stopped yelping and was just lying there, not moving. I went to pick her up and she started yelping again. As soon as I put her back down, she was quiet again.
I didn’t know what was wrong but a couple of things seemed obvious. She wasn’t paralyzed but when she moved, she was in pain. As long as she was lying straight and on her stomach, she seemed fine.
It was about bed time when all this happened. I did manage to pick her up (causing her to yelp in pain) and take her outside to use the bathroom. I then brought her in and put her on the bed. Usually when I put her on the bed, she walks around from corner to corner sniffing. Tonight she just laid on her stomach the same way she had on the floor, not moving. She seemed to be comfortable as long as she was in that position. We didn’t get much sleep that night because we were afraid we would roll over on her.
The next morning I took her to our vet and got the diagnosis for what was wrong: She had Intervertebral disc disease (IVDD). Which means she had one or more ruptured discs in her back. Because she was half-dachshund, she had a longer spine than most dogs. Dachshunds have the same number of vertebrae in their spine as other dogs, they are just spread out more. And is why dachshunds are very prone to having back problems as they age.
And that is what was wrong with Bella. I found out that there were three options for us to treat Bella’s condition. One was to take her to Denver or Dallas to see a veterinary back specialist to do surgery. That was the best option but also the most expensive—costing about $10,000 when all was said & done. Well, we couldn’t afford that so Option One was off the table.
The second option was foregoing surgery for rehabilitative physical therapy. This was also expensive unless the pet owner had the time to administer the physical therapy themselves (which was quite labor intensive.)
The third option, for those who could neither afford the money nor the time for the first two options, was to put the pet down. Well, luckily, I had been retired for about five years so I did have the time and that was what we did: I educated myself using the internet & you tube on how to heal a dog suffering from IVDD without surgery.
The first thing I learned is that the dog has to be crate-bound 24/7 for at least three months in order to restrict their movement. They get food & water in the crate and are only allowed outside of the crate to go to the bathroom, which
must be closely watched so that the animal doesn’t run or jump when seeing a squirrel or the mailman or a cat, etc.
After the three months (not during but after), then it’s a slow process of taking them for short walks, then longer walks, then doing massages & small jumps over bigger & bigger objects, then strengthening her leg muscles, etc—all in the hope of allowing the scar tissue in her spine to form which is needed in order for her back to heal.
Bella was a real trouper through all this. She was a happy dog no matter what bad things were happening to her. The only time she struggled was at bed time. Her crate (which was big enough to hold a much bigger dog) was in the living room and when we went to bed she would whine and throw a fit during the night because she was used to sleeping with us in the bed.
But Lynn solved that problem when she suggested we should get a second, smaller crate to keep in the bedroom right next to the bed, which we did. It solved the problem. As long as she was near us, she was happy.
The good news was that after about nine months, her back was almost 100% cured! We still had to be careful and monitor her whereabouts and keep her in one of her crates on a regular basis (but not all the time) because all it would take would be one jump off the couch or one rush to the door to bark at the mailman or one leap at a squirrel in a tree to injure her back and we would be right back where we started.
But she wasn’t totally crate-bound. We could let her out in confined areas like my computer room. And I went out of my way to take her outside (on a leash of course) at least four times a day (and each time letting her roam around the front or back yard for at least 10-15 minutes at a time. And plus I bought her a really nice cart to train her to use so that Lynn or I could take her for walks around the neighborhood without putting any stress on her back.
So that was the good news. But there was a major component to her recovery that ultimately proved to be too big of an obstacle for her to overcome. And that was the pain meds she was on. With my vet’s supervision, she started her journey of recovery pretty drugged up and out of it, in order to alleviate the terrible pain her back was in. And then for the first six months of her recovery, it was a question of slowly weaning her off her meds as her back healed. All well and good because that’s what happened.
But unfortunately she contracted Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) which was one of the side effects of all her medication. IBD is the animal version of Crohn’s disease in humans. And basically it meant her stomach couldn’t properly
digest her food in order to abstract the necessary nutrients into her bloodstream that she needed. And because her bowel was inflamed, she would get diarrhea on a regular basis.
We knew something was wrong because after three months of being completely crate-bound and inactive, she was actually losing weight (even though the amount of food we were giving her was the same as before her back problems). If anything, she should have been gaining weight as a result of all that inactivity.
But the good news was that after some experimenting with medications and different foods, we finally hit on a medication that seemed to manage her inflammation (at least it stopped the diarrhea for the most part). So with her medication and her diet (which consisted of the blandest dog food available and nothing else), we were able to stop her diarrhea and maintain her weight at around ten pounds.
Even so I felt sorry for her. I wished I could vary her diet to include something besides that gruel that she had to eat (which is what that bland dog food reminded me of). But if I tried to give her any other kind of dog food or a dog biscuit or any kind of treat, it would set off her diarrhea. She couldn’t even eat the dry kibble form of her really bland dog food. It had to be out of the can because it was soft and easy for her to digest. And people food was definitely out.
But like I said, she was always a happy dog. And even though her food looked and smelled terrible (at least to me) she was always happy to get it and always gobbled it up like it was the finest cuisine on the face of the earth. I guess I would too if it was that or nothing.
I also felt sorry for her because I could no longer train her to use her cart in order to take her on walks. About the time I started training her on that is when the IBD started flaring up. So I could no longer train her because I could no longer give her treats without her getting diarrhea.
But like I said, we did get her stabilized and everything seemed relatively okay. Even though we had to be very careful not to set off her diarrhea. I had to watch her very carefully when I took her outside to make sure that she didn’t find something on the ground and try to eat it (which could be hard because she was very sneaky—she learned to turn her head away from me so I couldn’t see her mouth as she sniffed the ground).
Or I had to constantly make sure nothing had been dropped on the floor in the rooms and the hall where she didn’t have to be confined. Eventually it got to
feel like we were keeping her in a crate so that she couldn’t wander around putting stuff in her mouth instead of because of her injured back.
And she was always hungry, even though I was feeding her four times a day. Our vet told us that she needed to eat a whole can of her dog food every day in order to get the nutrition she needed. Sometimes I got her up to that daily amount of food but a lot of times I didn’t. And the times I didn’t, I was always gradually trying to increase her intake to get to that level (an entire can a day) without setting off her diarrhea.
It’s funny when I think back on it. I’m just realizing as I write this that she hardly ever had diarrhea in the house. 95% of the time it was when I took her outside after feeding her. So she wasn’t making messes in the house but it was still not good. In fact, it was dangerous for her.
We had pills that we gave her whenever her diarrhea flared up but the only thing that really stopped it was for her to fast for 24 hours which allowed her gut to recuperate. The problem was, she was already skin & bones so she could not afford to lose any more weight. And I always had to start her on small doses of food after the 24 hours of fasting and gradually increase it. And she often time could go six weeks or two months without a flare up as I gradually increased her intake, trying to get her back up to a can a day. Sometimes she would even gain a half a pound or a pound. But even so, she was always hungry, looking for food on the floor and in the back yard.
And when she saw us eating or the cats eating, she never whined or made a whimper of complaint. But when I’d look at her, the look in her eyes would break my heart. It was as if she was saying: “I’m sorry, Daddy. Please don’t be mad. If you let me eat, I’ll be good.” I think in her little brain she thought that we weren’t feeding her because she was being punished for something.
So this was basically the routine with her for about 18 months after her back healed. Until things took a turn for the worse in November of 2025 when she stopped eating her food. Out of desperation, we took her to a different vet, who told us to stop giving her her diarrhea pill and instead gave us a medicine to give her orally from a syringe. She also had me feed Bella her dog food (mixed with water so that it was more of a liquid than a solid food) and to feed that to her through a syringe. And plus an appetite stimulant so that she would hopefully want to start eating again.
The hope was that her new diarrhea medicine would stop her diarrhea and that I wouldn’t have to fast her for 24 hours anymore (which was now becoming a
dangerous option because she was starting to lose weight pretty severely). And you know what? It seemed to work for about a week or so.
But it was an ordeal to feed her with a syringe every day (the appetite stimulant wasn’t really working). I had to feed her three times a day and it was a slow process: each feeding taking almost two hours. And we got to where we both hated having to feed her that way. She was starting to change towards me. It was so traumatic for her that she started being afraid of me. She would hear me putting her food in the syringe and she would go to the very back of her crate and shiver, not wanting to come out. I would have to crawl halfway in the crate, put on her leash, and pull her out.
I kept this up for almost a week because it seemed to be working with her new diarrhea medicine. But I finally stopped because when I was force feeding her, I could tell by the look in her eyes that it was pure torture for her and I couldn’t go through with it any longer. But I still had one final trick up my sleeve to get her to eat.
My vet told me to try giving her really bland people food (which most dogs prefer to their dog food). I had tried that before but it had set off her diarrhea. But with her new medicine, maybe this time it would work. So I cooked for her some scrambled eggs (no yolks), white rice, and boiled chicken. And for a couple of days it worked. She gobbled it up and would look at me wanting more. And it was so great to see her eating again! I really thought, after being at death’s door, that we had turned it around and that she would start eating again, putting weight back on, and getting her health back.
And especially since she had already been at death’s door and survived. When her back went out, there were moments when I thought we were going to have to put her down. We didn’t have the money for surgery but I did have time to try rehabilitation so that’s what I did, hoping against hope that she would get better. And that’s what happened! Her back was healed!
And so through all this with her bowel disease, I always held out hope that she would somehow survive it, that I would find a way to manage it. But after a couple of days of gobbling down her bland people food, she even stopped eating that. And that’s when I had to accept that I couldn’t save her.
It was like a dream where your friend is about to fall in a deep dark hole but you’ve got hold of their hands and are trying desperately to pull them up out of the hole. But the harder you try, the more you lose your grip until finally you’re forced to let go as they fall down into the hole. That’s what the whole ordeal felt like.
When she stopped eating her people food, I took her back to the vet and he did blood work on her. She had already dwindled down to about seven pounds by this point. He called me with the results and told me her kidneys were failing. And since she was no longer eating, her other organs would start to shut down (as her kidneys were now doing). He told me there was nothing we could do for her.
It might take a couple of days, it might take a week, but she was going to die. He told me he could give me some strong pain killers for her and that I could take her home and make her comfortable (a sort of pet hospice) or I could bring her in and we could put her to sleep.
I decided I didn’t want to put her through any more suffering so I called my vet and made an appointment the next day to bring her in to put her to sleep. That night in bed as she lay next to me for what I knew was to be the very last time, I didn’t get much sleep. Why did you have to leave me, my little Bella?
In a way, she already had. The last couple of weeks of her life, she was so sick that she wasn’t my Bella anymore. Not really. The cheerful little dog who was always just so happy to be by my side and lavish me with unconditional love with her licking and pawing and nudging was replaced with a Bella who was weak with hunger, lethargic, and not very alert. She lay there quietly by my side that last night, as she had a thousand nights before, as I rested my hand on her back and gently rubbed her neck.
The next morning, driving her to the vet was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. She was always so good at the vet, always just wanting to please whoever it was that was giving her a shot or taking her temperature or trimming her nails. I had several vets and their assistants tell me what a sweetheart she was (and funny enough, always using that adjective to describe her). They all fell in love with her.
As I held her in my arms that last morning at our vet, he explained to me what would happen (although it wasn’t necessary since we’d already put down several dogs with this vet in years past). He gave her a shot of anesthesia which was basically the same thing he would give animals that he was about to do surgery on. I held her in my arms and as I could feel her falling into a deep sleep, I whispered in her ear how much I loved her.
After she was out, I held her a few minutes longer. How I wished that once last time she would put her nose under my hand wanting to be petted. Finally, barely holding it together, I gave her to my vet’s assistant and she told me to just go on home, that I could call later in the day or tomorrow to settle the bill. It felt like one of the kindest things anybody has ever done for me.
Before I left, I turned and looked at Bella one last time as her lifeless body was carried to the back, and where they would give Bella another shot that would stop her heart.
Looking back at our previous pets, I once made the mistake of putting one of our dogs down too soon. By that I mean, the vet told me that with surgery, he could probably give her an extra year of life. But since it was so expensive, I decided to go ahead and put her down instead of having the surgery. They are always judgment calls but afterwards I felt I should have tried to give her another year of life.
Another dog that we had later, I put down too late, looking back on it. She was suffering and it was selfish of me to hold on to her so long. And those are both regrets that I have to live with (putting one dog down too early and one dog down too late). But I didn’t have those regrets with Bella. I know we did the right thing for her and at the right time. But it still hurts.
I loved all our pets but Bella was special. I am writing this six weeks after we lost her and I miss her terribly. It’s going to sound silly but from when we first got her, I always thought there was something omnipotent about Bella. That she was sent down here by God to keep a watch on Lynn and I and make sure we were doing okay. And I kinda secretly felt that way the whole time we had her.
Now I’ve come to think of her as my guardian angel. She came down from Heaven, in the form of a Chiweenie, to check on us for 11 years and went back to Heaven to report on us to God. “Yeah, they’re doing okay,” she tells God. God compliments her on a job well done but then also informs her that her owners miss her terribly. God tells her that her new assignment is to keep watch over Lynn and I but only in spirit. Which Bella happily agrees to.
So as I go through my days, she’s very much in my thoughts. I dream about saying to her “Where’s your baby?” which was her cue to go find her squeaky toy and bring it to me so that I could throw it down the hall for her to fetch and bring back to me (She never was very good at letting me have it once she brought it back. She had a death grip on it in her teeth, so that became part of the activity as well: playing tug of war with it until finally she let go when she was ready for me to throw it down the hall again for her to chase.)
She’s in my thoughts and I still feel her presence. I still feel her lying next to me as I sit at my computer. I still feel her next to me sitting in front of the TV. I feel her next to me in bed at night. When I leave the house, I instinctively wait for her to start barking as she used to do because she didn’t want me to leave her. Now it’s silent but in my mind I still hear her.
And it makes me feel better knowing that I will feel her next to me for the rest of my life and after. Excuse me, I’ve got to stop writing now because I can feel her nudging my ankle with the tip of her nose. She want’s my attention so that I never forget that for a time, it was all about Bella.