Black eyed P and Maggie's heart

The last few days have been a bit overwhelming for me. First, Thursday night Parker did a face-plant into the coffee table, hence his new nickname of "black eyed P." The bruise has gotten darker every day leading to more stares as we venture out in public.

Friday morning he slipped and bashed his face leading to a pretty bloody lip. He's managed to not get hurt during the last 24 hours so I'm hoping he's able to stay injury free for a bit.

And then there's Maggie. We have some sad news. Yesterday I let Maggie outside to go to the bathroom and after about 10 minutes without hearing her scratch to come back in (it was 15 degrees yesterday and she HATES being cold!) I discovered that she had collapsed in the backyard. I ran outside to find her having difficulty breathing and she was only semi-responsive. She refused to get up and I couldn't pick her up from the position she was in so I checked on the kids and called Justin and asked him to come home.

While he was on his way, Maggie perked up a bit and I was able to get her inside and she ate a biscuit which made me think maybe I had overreacted. And then a few minutes later she was again immobile on the carpet unable to pick her head up with her chest heaving for air. By the time Justin got home we thought she would die on the way to the vet.

He rushed her over there (our regular vet was closed for the day) and they said that it seemed like a heart problem and they wanted to do an EKG and some ultrasounds. We received a call later in the evening saying that they couldn't regulate her heart rate and wanted to keep her overnight to give her more fluids and try other medications. I was able to visit her at 7:30 and she seemed to be herself which put me at ease. However, when I went to pick her up this morning, the doctor told me that her heart condition is being externally caused, meaning she has a tumor somewhere. Of course he gave me the option to move forward with more invasive procedures to find the tumor and possibly remove it but I just paid $483 to find out she had one. I wasn't ready to pay another $480 for them to tell me where it is and there's nothing they can do about it.

So essentially, Maggie is dying...it's just a matter of time. We currently have medication to give her twice a day to keep her heart rate as steady as possible but the tumor could cause organ failure or heart failure and we don't know how long she has because we don't know where the tumor is or how severe it is. The emergency vet will fax over the paperwork to our regular vet on Monday and I'll get her opinion (which I trust without hesitation). We do know that if we hadn't taken her in she would not have been able to sustain that heart rate for more than a few hours. We are incredibly broken up about this because if we had waited she would have died but now we don't know when she will die or what her quality of life will be in the meantime.

Of course the kids don't understand and Madeleine just keeps asking me why I'm sad. We've told her Maggie is sick and we need to give her lots of love but she has no concept of death (thankfully). I hate this part of loving a pet so much.