A Tough Update About Ghost

We’ve shared a lot of life updates on this blog—some funny, some frustrating, and some just plain real. Unfortunately, this one falls into the heartbreaking category.

Yesterday we got some news about Ghost that we weren’t expecting. What we hoped was just a minor setback in his ongoing health saga turned out to be much more serious. After a an echocardiogram, we found out that Ghost has severe pulmonary hypertension. Not a collapsing trachea like we thought, well, he does have that but it's minor, not related to what's going on now.

He’s only five years old. For a small dog, that’s still young—he should have had at least ten more good years ahead of him. It’s tough when something like this pops up out of nowhere and completely shifts your world.

We’ve been down a long road with him already—managing his epilepsy, changing medications, adjusting routines, hoping for progress. For a while, it looked like things were getting better. But now, we’re faced with the reality that what we thought was improvement was actually just the calm before a storm.

From what we’ve learned, this is possibly one of the worst possible diagnoses for him. If the medication works, he might have a year, maybe a year and a half left with us. If he doesn’t respond to it, it could be as little as a few weeks.

That’s a gut punch we weren’t ready for.

Right now, we’re focused on giving him as much love and comfort as we can. He’s still eating, wagging his tail, and being his usual sweet, stubborn self. So we’re taking it day by day, doing everything we can to make whatever time we have left with him feel like a lifetime’s worth of love. Hopefully, he responds well to the medication and things start to improve—giving us more time with him than what the research says. That’s what we’re holding onto.

By the way, never look up medical things on Google. Even for your pet. It's always doom and gloom. It's never, "Oh you just need to do this and he'll be fine".

I could be wrong, and quite frankly I hope I'm wrong, and he has many years to come. He's my dude. He hangs with me in the office all day while I'm working. And you bet we have conversations throughout the day. He understands me.

Thanks to everyone who’s followed along with Ghost’s journey and sent well wishes over the years. We’ll keep you posted as we learn more. For now, we’re just going to hug him a little tighter and be grateful for every moment.