In Memory of Chester Our Pekingese

Chester was our pekingese dog. He was beautiful. Everyone says he looked like a gremlin. What a little character. He was so quiet you forgot he was in the house. He was very picky about what he ate.

When we bathed him and blew dry his fur, he was just gorgeous, and he knews it. He just struted and swished around, bouncing up and down as if to say,"Look At Me, I Am Beautiful!."

One evening during dinner Chester hunched up his back and threw up. His back stayed arched up into a point. It looked horible. He became disoriented and tried to bite anyone who came near him. We rushed him to the vet and they said he had had a spinal stroke. They said it was an extremely painful experience. They prescribed prednisone and muscle relaxers and kept him overnight. The next day he would not eat a thing so my sister went to the vets office armed with all his favorite foods, chicken, beef, oreos, peanut butter, but he would not even look at it. He kept turning his back and laying down. He couldn't stand on his right rear leg at all. The vet kept him 2 more days, giving him intervieneous fluids, muscle relaxers, and my sister kept visiting him to try to make him eat, but he just kept loosing weight and looking worse and worse. There was nothing else to do for the little guy. Finally, everyone agreed that it was time to put him to sleep to end his suffering. God what a hard thing to do. But we tried all we could to save him. I guess a spinal stroke is just something you just don't get over. We had no idea of his actual age, he could have been 12 or 15 years old for all we knew.

Scott E-mailed me to ask if Pekingese shed very much, I have to say in all honesty that they do shed, especially in early summer. His hair just seems to fall out in clumps for about a month. But if you comb him everyday, which he loves, it's really not all that bad.

Chester weighed about 12 1/2 pounds but didn't have an ounce of fat on him. He will only ate until he got full, he would not eat one more bite after a certain point. He was the kind of dog that would never get fat. My sister feed him off of a fork. Yes, I said off of a fork. He liked Alpo Prime Cuts Stew or Iams Chicken flavor. But he hated Skippy, he just wouldn't touch it. He wouldn't eat Madison's dried liver or her homebaked biscuits either. Occasionally you could get him to take a small piece of Iams dog bone, but that was rare.

After dinner, he usually wanted an Oreo cookie, then at about 10:00 pm or so he started to dance around the kitchen and that meant he wanted a peanut butter sandwich, no jelly, just peanut butter. He liked it fed to him by hand in little pieces. You had to wrap the bread around the peanut butter so it wouldn't get stuck on the roof of his mouth. Can you believe that? What a character. I guess he was spoiled rotten, and it's our fault, but who cares.

We had a problem with his nose, it was so dry it seemed to flake apart. We talked to a vet about it and he said it was probably a fatty acid deficency that could date back to when he was a puppy (we just got him a year ago). He said there were pills available for this but when we looked at them they were huge. So, the vet said we could put some vegetable oil into his food and that may help. We have been putting about 2 teaspoons of vegetable oil in his Alpo and it did really help his nose. It got smoother and moister every day.