It is with a heavy heart that I am writing to tell you that my Black and Tan Coonhound, Buford, passed away yesterday. When we adopted him back in 2010, he was named Kasey on your site. He had a small mass at the back of his tongue that started bleeding last weekend, so we took him to the vet. They kept him overnight so that they could operate the next morning. His blood work came back with a low platelet count, so they didn't want to operate on him like that. The bleeding had stopped, so we took him home while they determined what the cause of the low platelet count was. The pathologist said everything looked fine, and based on the visual, he had a normal platelet count of around 170k-220k, so we scheduled his surgery for September 17th. This Saturday morning was just like any other morning. Buford was begging at my bedside at 7:30am for me to feed him breakfast, which he scarfed down in about a minute. He was his normal happy self until Saturday evening when he took a turn for the worse. I went to feed him dinner around 6pm, but he wouldn't eat. He drank a little water, but I could tell he wasn't feeling well, as he NEVER misses a meal, so we took him to the vet around 8pm. When we got to the vet he was struggling to walk, they did blood work and xrays, and found numerous tumors on his lungs. They determined it was adenocarcinoma, and told us that there was nothing that they could do outside of symptomatic treatment. They gave him some Tramadol, I made an appointment with a vet to come to our house at 8am the next morning to euthanize him, and we took him home around 12am. I laid with him all night rubbing his belly and scratching his neck before he finally gave up the fight around 5am. I'm still in shock at how fast it happened, but I'm glad he didn't suffer for very long. He was an amazing dog, I feel like I've lost my best friend and family member. He was loved immensely, and he reciprocated that love tenfold and so much more.

Garrett Dalton