Assurances

I finally got in touch with my vet last night, having decided about a week ago to try to describe to her in detail the process of Raleigh's dying and death, and see if she had any ideas abut what may have happened. I had put the dogs in the back yard because they'd been wrestling at the top of the stairs so rough that Raleigh had actually fallen down a few stairs before stopping himself with paws spread wide and then bounded back up to Hazel. They had the crazies. So I put them outside. But I wanted to ask her, is it possible that fall precipitated his extremely sudden death 10 or 15 minutes later?

The short answer, of course, was that there was no way of knowing what had happened. She didn't seem very worried about his fall down a few steps, and she threw out a number of ideas about what could have happened -- a simple seizure, which can in some cases be fatal; a blood clot; a stroke; an embolism, which I had to look up (Wikipedia says: "an embolism is the event of lodging of anembolus [a detached intravascular mass capable of clogging capillary beds at a site far from its origin] into a narrow capillary vessel of an arterial bed which causes a blockage  in a distant part of the body"). In short, when something that fast happens in a young healthy dog, you just can't really tell.

However, she did say say that given how quickly it happened (over the course of 45 second or maybe a couple of minutes -- my panicked brain may not have been judging time accurately) it sounded like there was absolutely nothing I could have done to prevent it, and nothing I could have done to fix it once the process had started. She said that it was doubtful that anything could have been done even if a vet had been right there when it happened.

So I guess that's reassuring.

And sad.

Mostly sad.