Loss of best friend and looking for advice

I lost my dog, my best friend, at the end of February. In January I had noticed she was starting to look older, and thought I’d probably have another 1-2 years with her. She was pretty newly 12 and healthy and active all her life. Large breed.

By end of January she developed a duck honking cough, and seemed to be getting tired more easily and losing appetite. I brought her to vet who said her breathing sounded fine, her heart rate was high which wasn’t abnormal for her at the vet, but also a bit weaker and she was commenting on her weight loss over the past year, about 2.2 kg. She said it could be a number of things. I asked what kind of treatments there could be, and if it would be a surgical approach I wouldn’t want to proceed due to age. She didn’t really give me straight answers and said she would need X-rays and blood panel. Which I understand. I went home discussed with partner, we returned later that week and had diagnostic testing done. I was home with my 5 month old and 3.5 year old daughters, husband took our dog. He said that the rads maybe showed a shadow on the heart and there was busy ness in the lungs. They weren’t worried it would be her heart they told him, but if we wanted to investigate more then we can do an ultrasound when the us tech/vet came later in the week. They then prescribed coticosteroid and antibiotic for her cough.

3 days into meds her cough is seeming better but she is refusing food. I think oh maybe it’s the meds side effects, hurting her tummy. I offer plain beef and rice, she eats ok for a couple days, her cough is still her and the vet now gave us a suppressant to try (I updated them on her status of not eating food). We couldn’t give her any of the suppressant and she then started to refuse the beef and rice (my dog was a foodie queen so her refusing things like this adds to the devastation). By day 7 she is refusing almost all food except maybe 1-2 tablespoons hand fed bits. Not able to give her meds to wean her off steroid. I contact vet via email and phone as no answer on phone. Update them. They say to just have us to do the ultrasound and then regurgitate the standard weaning info for the steroid dismissing the fact she is refusing everything. I also asked for a probiotic which they did leave for me, I didn’t end up getting as she wasn’t eating any food, and I didn’t want to traumatized or scare her by adding more meds or supplements into the mix. A couple days later she isn’t drinking much anymore and she is struggling with moving and walking even to the bathroom. We bring her back in- up to this point I was thinking this was mostly all side effects from the heavy meds and that maybe they could give her fluids or something to help her.

They told me she had a lot of fluid in her they wanted to check if there was blood in the fluid, and do the ultrasound quickly at the same time. They came back in and told me she had right sided heart failure, and her heart was walking a tight rope. Talked euthanasia and gave me a med that could help for her heart. I brought her home that day but ultimately brought her back for euthanasia as I didn’t want her to suffer in her final moments.

I have been so heartbroken. I also am shocked by how rapidly she declined in 3 weeks and question if the treatment she had was right. I looked at her notes and X-rays since and her heart looked huge and the busy ness they said was in her lungs more clearly looks to be around her heart and outside of lungs. A quick couple image search of dog with heart failure xray, shows an image almost like my dogs except that my dogs heart was even bigger. I am a bit concerned that they didn’t push a case towards heart failure after those X-rays and worried they really missed something and by missing something I made my girl suffer those last 3 weeks rather than treating her well and her actually eating like the food lover she was. I guess I wanted to share and see what others think. I am haunted by the thought that I lost her trust in her final weeks by forcing her meds, and making her worse and her thinking I was trying to harm her instead of make her better. I loved my sweet girl so much, she chose me as much as I chose her and she was everything I needed for 12 years.