Katie on her dog bed

I shared this photo (also on this blog two years ago) on Instagram yesterday as Facebook has been reminding me over the past three weeks about Katie's impending -- and then subsequent -- surgery and recovery. You can see where her IV was inserted, her incision, and the shrinking bruising area. A couple of days prior she had decided for herself that she wanted to go lie on top of her dog bed instead of the spare mattress we had set up for her to lie on as she recovered from her surgery. That's where I found her. At this point of time she was almost a week removed from her amputation.

It still pains me at times when I think about her now; I'll never get completely over it. I feel like that for Alex, Nikki, and Sadie (who died six months after Katie) who came before her, and I'll feel like that for Bean and Billy Bob (who came after her) whenever their time comes. But I look at all the pictures I took of Katie and I can better appreciate the nearly ten years she graced our household.

There are a lot of Katie memories, both good and bad, in those pictures. But Katie is in there, and that's really all that matters.

Three months

It's been three months since Katie's death from lymphoma.

I think of her (and of our other two departed greys, Alex and Nikki) every day. And there are many days where I browse through some of the several thousand pictures that I took of her. She was with us for nearly nine years, and even now those thousands of pictures seem inadequate. Oh, most are terrible and not worth sharing with everyone, to be sure, but I saved them.

I cling to these pictures as a way to hang onto her for as long as I can. I won't say that looking at these pictures always brings me comfort — it doesn't. But when it does I go back and think of how well she recovered from her amputation. We were so pleased and happy for her that she gained weight during her chemo treatments because it can cause appetite loss and Katie was never really food-motivated.

I'm rambling now and I can't write a coherent train of thought, so I will leave you with this picture of Katie as she was back in 2008, a couple of months after Nikki had died:

 

I used light coming in through a window to get this. I added +0.7 exposure compensation because I didn't want the light meter to render her in a dull gray. She had this wondering look on her face as Sadie was standing in front of her. Katie's eyes were wonderful and I tried to capture that.

(Shot with the Nikon D300 and the 18-200mm zoom; aperture-priority with aperture set to f/4.8, ISO 1100 at shutter speed of 1/30 second; cloudy-weather white balance; +0.7 exposure compensation; normal JPG.)