Baby Kirby deserves to be home, healthy and well

Travis Scannell is organizing this fundraiser.

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Any dog lovers know that a pet quickly becomes family. Meet mine...baby Kirby. She is a the most loveable, seven month old Border Terrier you could ever imagine. She has sass, she has spirit, she has drive, she has fight, and she has more love to give than I have ever seen in a puppy. However, my little Kirby has come down with some health issues that are unexplainable.

She went in to my known veterinarian to be spayed and had some complications during the procedure. We are not sure if it was a reaction the anesthetic agent or what, but her blood pressure dropped significantly, her breathing slowed and her little heart stopped beating for a short period of time. I am told everything was going fine with the procedure and then alarms started going off as if a switch was flipped. She was revived after puppy CPR, but is not the same puppy. Yet she has the same amount of my heart as she ever did...all of it.

After being revived, Kirby showed very minimal signs of neural function. Her eyes are open, her heart is beating strongly, her blood pressure looks good and her organs are functioning well from what I am told. However, she has no motor function and cannot control her bladder, stand, walk, roll over or raise her head. She cannot eat or drink without assistance. She cannot focus her eyes which has led the doctors to determine that she is now blind. At just over seven months old my baby should be running around my yard after me and nipping at my heels and smiling her beautiful smile, not fighting for her life.

She is currently at the Kansas State Emergency Veterinary Hospital and is recieving the best care possible. The intake veterinarian told me she could come back to full function and this may be temporary due to a stroke or seizure while under the anesthetic. She is being monitored around the clock by their staff and I could not ask for better care from those providers. Baby Kirby wants to come back. I could feel it as I drove her to Manhattan. She wants to run and play and smile again. She wants to be with me. She is not done fighting. She needs help and time to get back to me though.

However, this kind of care is not cheap. It costs nearly a thousand dollars a day to keep her there and, with no pet insurance, my cushion is going to run out. I have always tried to stand on my own, but I do not want the reason I cannot bring home my baby to be because I did not swallow any pride and reach out to ask for help and do absolutely everything I could to ensure she recieved the best chance to make it.

She is my family and I would give all I could to ensure I could bring her home. A thank you for any help is not enough. I would not want to put anyone in my situation of helplessness and feeling as though hope is fading with each passing day. Not being with her and walking into my quiet house which Kirby helped make a home was worse than I had imagined.

A small sidebar story.....I told someone a story of how every time I take a shower, she pokes her little nose around the curtain or gingerly steps across the ridge, halfway into the shower and laps up of of the water while splashing her feet with joy. I took a shower yesterday and did not realize how much I cherished that until she was not at home to do it. It was probably one of the worst feelings of my life.