Yoshi Echoes

Social media celebrates a lot of things including friendship anniversaries, birthdays, and old posts. And so randomly throughout the week Google or Facebook take turns digging up old photos of Yoshi.

Bittersweet is the perfect description for such moments. They still make us feel a little sad to see him since that reminds us that he's gone and that we miss him so much. But then it also gets us into retelling old stories of his quirks and the little things that made him such a lovable, adorable dog.

There will always be a gap in our hearts where Yoshi lives on and we will forever treasure that.

Seven Years and more

Today, Rocky and I celebrate 7 years of being together.  Seven years of loving each other unconditionally.  Seven years of enjoying the games we love, watching the shows we enjoy and celebrating our successes and surviving our challenges together.

In the seven years that we have shared together, we have had a lot of twists and surprises, laughs and discoveries, stories and inside jokes.  In very many ways, I know I've become selfish about a bunch of them, wanting them to be special moments that we keep just between us. And of course there are the tears and the painful moments we have to survive together.  But at the same time, there's a lot of happiness and joy that we would like to share.  A lot of things we wish others can learn to appreciate as well.  To believe in.

Seven years today.
And the rest of our lives, onwards.

I love you, Rocky.
And Yoshi will continue to live in our years, along with everyone else we love and have lost.

Yoshi's Fifth Birthday

Had things turned out differently, today would have been Yoshi's fifth birthday.

Happy Birthday, Yoshi! We miss you so much and we love you. Hope you're having lots of bananas.

A Month Without Yoshi

It has been a month since Yoshi passed away and the Sietch is a very quiet place without him. Tobie still lights a candle for him whenever we're home as his way of remembering him while also making it feel like he's still there. His dog bed still rests in the middle of the living room with his favorite stuffed toy Baboy still resting on it. The bed is pretty much where he passed away as well.

You don't ever fully "move on" from the loss of a loved one including beloved family pets. My heart still aches a bit when I think of close friends lost in recent years like Jayson and PJ, and now Yoshi is a part of that circle of departed loved ones now. It's easy to fall into the trap of second-guessing ourselves and wondering if we really did everything that we could have possibly done to help him. So instead Tobie and I do our best to support one another and focus on the good memories instead of the pain of his loss.

The last blog post that I wrote here talked about our treating our last days with Yoshi as gifts, and I still believe that. We got a good six months with him after he was diagnosed with chronic kidney failure and we were all the better for it. Yoshi taught me and Tobie many thing about ourselves through our care for him and those are lessons we'll carry with us for the rest our lives.

I still wish he was still with us, that goes without saying. I miss our happy little guy who'd help make any stressful day that much easier to deal with because of his unconditional love and affection. He really did something to change the way the Sietch felt like really added something that made us feel like even more of a family.

We miss you, Yoshi, and we love you so much. Hope you're having a good time wherever you are. Eat plenty of bananas and explore all the perfectly dry grass that you can find. I think you have Baboy with you, too, along with our love.

Each Day With Yoshi Is A Gift

A little while back, Yoshi's doctors said he about two weeks left to live. While we had long accepted that his kidney disease was going to be a life-long condition that we'd need to manage, it was still quite jarring for the doctors to already make that sort of a pronouncement.

Since then, we've been doing our best to support him and hopefully find a way to extend his life as much as possible without adding too much discomfort either. Thus our efforts exploring Traditional Chinese Medicine and trying to make him happier with better food.

We're already past that two week mark and we now try to remind ourselves that each new day is yet another gift of added time with Yoshi. If we're lucky, we'll get a few more months with him, maybe even finishing up 2016 or something. But for now we're just making the most of the time that we have and we continue to hope for the best. It's far better to celebrate each day instead of dwelling on the inevitability of thing end. All things must end eventually, after all. It's only a question of when. Given that, it feels like a lot more sense to take a positive view of things instead of giving up and expecting the worst all time.

We love you, Yoshi. We love you so, so much. And we're facing this together as a family.

It's The Little Moments

I love these two doggies. 

With all my heart.

Yoshi's Battle So Far

This is Yoshi's needle jar.

As part of his maintenance treatment for his kidney disease, we have to administer saline solution subcutaneously via IV every other day. Initially we'd have to bring him to the vet to get this done. In time they taught us how to handle it ourselves.

This jar represents all the needles we've used in the course of keeping Yoshi as healthy as can be manged despite his condition. After three months of treatment at home plus another just at the clinic, it looks like the jar is almost full. And we don't even get to handle every single treatment in the week. There are the one or so times that we have to go to the clinic since our schedule is too tight and we get worried we'll get home too late to keep Yoshi on schedule.

It doesn't get any easier to bring the needle to Yoshi's skin but we persevere because it is what's best for him. More than the money we've spent and all the medicines we've administered, this jar is, for me, the greatest reminder that Yoshi's life changed after his diagnosis last December.

But it's already April and we continue on and we couldn't be prouder of our little dog - even though he doesn't seem to think he's a dog. We do our best to manage things as best as we can despite his moods and his fickle appetite and all the other struggles.

We do all this because we love Yoshi dearly and for as long as he continues to fight, we'll fight right alongside him as well. It's all worth it in the end, even if we're only buying a few more weeks, months or years with him. Every moment is precious and we're fortunate that we can even afford to keep up with his treatments and his medications and all that stuff. But it's not like we're going to have kids anytime soon. We might as well invest in this little white dog who is much bigger than he seems.

Distance and Challenges

2016 has been a year filled with challenges.  We learned Yoshi has some kidney issues and our lives have now somewhat been altered to keep him closer to our daily schedules.  The importance of our baby getting proper food, exercise, and medication, has made certain activities less viable and certain duties more vital.  Despite this, however, we see no reason to give up on him because even with the kidney disease, Yoshi is still a loving and wonderful dog who always helps bring a smile to our faces.

Life is like that.  Certain challenges are inevitable.  Life will always have its moments of throwing you under the bus or spinning you in a cyclone of unexpected events.  But in the end, whether its the uncertainty of finding a house to call our home, or the distance of being in another country, if one works on it together as a couple, one can find even unbeatable things... surmountable.

(Not certain that's an actual word, but yeah.)

Rocky is all the way at Singapore today for a business trip.  I'm here with our dog, Yoshi, at the BGC unit where his office is to watch the fort.  But despite the many miles of distance between us, I know we are connected and still anchored to each other - certain that no matter how challenging the trials the world will throw at us, we will be facing it together and there to support each other.

And that's what love it.

Yoshi vs Thunder

Yoshi really doesn't like the sound of thunder.

To be fair, it doesn't make him bark or whine. He doesn't hide off in a corner nor does he run around. Instead he huddles as close as possible to any humans he knows, which is an interesting situation here at the office. This afternoon's thunderstorm had Yoshi going from person to person, huddling under desks right next to people's legs.

I even hoisted him up into my lap and he was perfectly content staying there while I worked. Of course this isn't exactly an easy position to balance and so working became a bit more difficult as Yoshi made himself all comfortable.

Eventually I just got him a chair and kept him beside me and for the most part he's been there, except to say goodbye to folks as they left the office.

Yet another reason we love this dog so much.

Birthdays Are For Ice Cream

Happy Birthday, Tobie!

Yoshi says you can have more ice cream!

Non-Traveling Geeks

So I managed to get Maundy Thursday and Good Friday last week and thus I actually had a lengthy Holy Week vacation with Tobie. And we pretty much spent the long weekend at home with a few friends coming over to play board games and RPGs. It was a lot of fun even though we didn't leave the building this whole time.

The summer time is usually one invested in big out of town trips, as far as Facebook is concerned. This weekend alone we saw a good number of folks who hit the beaches of Puerto Galera, Palawan or Boracay. And yet you have geeks like Tobie and me who just stayed in the city.

And it's not like we're against travel or even against beaches - we have our fair share of time at the beach (even with Yoshi!) But it's just not something that comes up a lot. There is the desire to bring Yoshi back to a beach and see how he might react to the change in environment so many years later.

But the challenge of travel is, well, the traveling. We don't necessarily mind going to Singapore since the trip is pretty easy and then we get to stay with my sister while there. That makes it a nicely homey environment even when in another country. Beach trips, especially local ones, mean making the most of cramped environments and a lot less creature comforts compared to other locations.

But let's see - anything is possible and maybe we'll find the time to schedule something in the future. Although, WiFi or internet connectivity of some sort is rather crucial regardless of where we end up visiting. It's really hard not to have access to the internet, especially since I blog daily.

Stretchy Dog!

Because Yoshi is a dog worth celebrating.