This is the biggest dog bed I have made to date. Unfortunately, I lost the picture I took of the full bed before giving it away. I gave it to the Danville Boyle County Humane Society which was having an auction to raise money for our low cost spay/neuter clinic, Happy Paws, a great clinic with which I volunteer every week myself.The clinic is run almost entirely by volunteers, only the vet and the vet tech are paid, everybody else is a volunteer. We are open one full day a week and over the course of the four years the clinic has been in operation we have spayed or neutered over 5,800 dogs and cats. In addition to doing great work in helping keep the population of unwanted cats and dogs down, it is also a really fun place to volunteer. I have met some wonderful people at Happy Paws and made some good friends there. I look forward every week to spending time with the dogs and the fun and good people who chose to volunteer at Happy Paws.
One of the most competent people who work at Happy Paws is the vet tech Nikki. Nikki works as a vet tech at a local veterenarian's office most of the time, but on Thursdays, she has been working at Happy Paws, which has been a life saver for us. She is incredibly competent, a no nonsense person who knows how to handle just about any situation, and has a great sense of humor to go along with it. Unfortunately for us, Nikki has recently gone back to school and is currently studying to become a people nurse, so she is only rarely able to spend the entire day with us. We miss her terribly already, but she will be such a terrific nurse that it is impossible to be anything but happy about her decision.Due to my admiration of Nikki, I was particularly happy when I found out after the auction that it was she who had bought Dog Bed 15 for her big rescue dog, Kingston.
And because I knew the person who got the bed, I also thought it would be no problem getting a photo of the bed with the dog on it. However, unbelievably, when I asked Nikki recently for just such a picture, she told me that Kingston suddenly had developed severe internal bowel issues - related to injuries sustained years ago before he was rescued from being an abused fighting dog - and that he had to be euthanized. Nevertheless, Nikki sent me the above picture, Kingston's Christmas photo, where he sits on the dog bed. It is a great picture of Kingston and I am honored to have it even if it doesn't show much of the bed. As you can see in the picture, Kingston was a big handsome dog who needed an extra large dog bed. I know he was fortunate to live for a while with a person with an extra large heart who took extra good care of him, and I also know that he left an extra large hole in her heart when he had to die so suddenly. Having recently lost my own Jesse to old age, I can only begin to imagine how hard it must be to lose what she thought was a healthy dog so suddenly.
