The Strength lies within!

This post is a tribute to the most resilient, the strongest, the happiest, spunkiest being I have ever met!.. My dear Queen Layla!

Today marks a year since she suffered a paralytic stroke causing her to lose feeling and control over her body waist down. It happened rather suddenly, we think caused by the panic she felt on hearing fire crackers; she came running upstairs and sat down and wouldn't get up after that. It took us a while to figure out that it was not that she wouldn't but that she couldn't get up. Her vet confirmed our worst fears along with saying that there is no way to tell if she will ever walk again and that she was too old for any surgery to help the problem. We were offered suggestions to put her down as she would be in a lot of discomfort. All of this happened when I was away and my super woman of a sister Nidhi dealt with the news from the vet by herself. I didn't know what was going to hit me till I got home and she couldn't wag her tail at me. I was overwhelmed by grief and spent about an hour hugging her and weeping. But at the end of it I told myself that there was no point in grief, courage was what we needed.We had to be strong for Layla and as long as she wanted to fight, we would fight with her. We told ourselves that as long as Layla was upbeat we would not give up on her. My lovely sister Nidhi, Dad, Mum and me were her army, and did we fight or what.

We spent months taking turns watching her, not leaving her side for even a few minutes. It was a continuous cycle of feeding her,cleaning her up as she had lost bowel control, spending nights awake not wanting her to lie in her own filth, turning her from side to side often to ensure that her underside was not becoming sore. As we did all this our Layla fought, everyday she tried to move her legs, to stand up, to not pee at home. She patiently endured the spinal shock treatments we took her to every other day in the hope of reviving the nerves. We supplemented this with physio therapy on her legs that we learnt and administered ourselves to keep her muscles strong when her nerves were back in action.






Our first little breakthrough happened when I wandered out of the bathroom into the room that she was in and she perked her head up and wagged her tail at me. Just like before, a happy wag full of love! We knew then that we would do anything to keep this going.

We became her hind legs, we held her legs up like a wheel barrow and took her for her walks, and she walked, going in to small nooks and crannies behind trees not the least bit concerned about the fact that her human hind legs would not fit in those spaces. We walked her like this for months, and kept up the physio therapy and she slowly started regaining the feeling in her legs. She would stand for the shortest time on rough surfaces, cautiously walk a drunken unstable walk for two steps before crashing.

Slowly but steadily we could see her fighting spirit take over, she was not about to give up, she wanted not only to live but to walk and pee and meet her doggy buddies and sniff their behinds without us being her hind legs. A year in we are happy to report that she is almost back to normal now. She has some trouble actually getting up to a standing position but she walks by herself and can even climb a few stairs on her own.  

Layla has taught me like no one else the power of the mind. If you want to do something you will find a way! Her quiet, patient strength and resilience has made me stronger and made my love for her deeper than ever before.