(Note: this is a post I made on Substack on June 10, 2025. I really liked it and I wanted to share and save it here. We still miss her a lot.)
All of our animals have been great. And we’ve had several REALLY great ones. But 5 years ago we hit the jackpot.
Right before the pandemic closed everything down, we brought home an energetic little dumpling just under the wire and Val became part of our family. She immediately settled in and became one of my favorite models.
All styles…
Anything that was at hand…
Val was a lot of firsts for our house. She was the first “official” rescue where we actually went to the shelter (in our case Lifeline Animal Project) to choose our newest pack member . She was our first pittie. She was the first dog we had that liked to burrow under the covers to sleep next to you. We’d been looking at the pups at several Lifeline shelters and while all of them tugged at our hearts we hadn’t really found OUR dog yet. And then we saw her. She was a wee little thing. Underweight and alone shivering in a kennel. She saw us and her tail started wagging and never stopped. Then she smiled at us…
Because of her huge personality I eventually started writing and illustrating a book about her. I wanted to encourage people to adopt and not to sleep on these amazing little bundles of love. Snuggly and sweet and so freaking cute…I wanted people to start loving them as much as we loved our little pierogi.
Unfortunately, soon after I started this project we got our first cancer diagnosis for her and I stopped working on it. Maybe one day I can start again. The ONLY downside to pitties is sometimes they like to grow mast cell tumors. This began a fight that was uphill from the jump.
She fought as hard as you can and was always wiggly happy. Even if she was going in for chemo Val was always super excited to see our specialists at St. Francis animal hospital (if you’re in the Atlanta/Decatur area and need an emergency vet, they are fantastic). We became very familiar with the people there and they ADORED Val. They have an entire library of lore about our sweet pup and apparently did little photo shoots of selfies with her. She was absolutely in the best hands.
We fought it for 3 years. We punched back as much as we could, but in the end it wasn’t enough. The cancer was aggressive and became too much for our girl to handle. Last Thursday we said goodbye to our little angel. It was simultaneously the hardest and easiest thing we’ve ever done. (Okay…mostly the hardest.) We never EVER wanted to lose her but we would have rather cut off our arms than have her suffer for one second.
We never announce publicly when we lose an animal. It is a pain that stabs us far too deeply to just say out loud. But Val was different. Everybody who met her, LOVED her. Her personality and excitement to meet everybody was infectious. She was an amazing companion. And we wanted to let people know…you should absolutely ignore all the bad stories and associations with this type of dog. I have never known a creature that took in every bit of love and affection you gave her…and radiated it back a million times over. She was amazing.
And I’m so very glad we got to love her.
-The Paintmonkey
Thong
Hi~(*￣▽￣*)