Sahraa crossed the Rainbow Bridge this afternoon after struggling with cognitive dysfunction, evidence of cancer in her blood, growing weakness in her legs and refusing to eat anything at all for a week. The internal medicine specialist felt this would be best given the “perfect storm,” as he called it, of health problems that have only gotten worse in the past few weeks. We felt the same way and believed that even more invasive tests to pinpoint exactly where the cancer was and possible chemotherapy would do nothing for her quality of life, which had already deteriorated radically, and would only give her a few extra months to live – more for us than for her.

She has been a wonderful companion for the past 12 years and a good sport to travel all over the world with us without complaint. Not just because she was our Sahraa, but she was hands down the sweetest dog I’ve ever met.

This is an old picture from 2010 soon after we adopted her, when she had arrived in DC from Kuwait, one of 16 survivors of a shelter fire. We were lucky to find her, and hopefully she felt the same about us. We will miss her terribly.

Thank you to everybody for your sympathy and kind wishes for her recovery. I was going to post another picture instead and wait until tomorrow to post this one, but I decided that would be disrespectful of her memory, so here it is.

Best to view in "Original" because other versions resized by PBase are decidedly unsharp.

Update, posted earlier: