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'She just wanted to be with her granny'
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Published: September 5, 2008
HICKORY - Jessica Robinson got Sugar when the puppy was four weeks old and fit into one hand. She had to use a baby bottle every four hours to feed the tiny Pekingese/Dachshund mix.
When Robinson went to work, her mom, Barbara Johnson, kept the dog.
"She was Sugar's granny," Robinson says. "She would hold her and rock her. They were really attached."
When Johnson went to the hospital in January, Sugar fell into doggie depression. Robinson says she wouldn't eat or sleep. She just paced around the house. After her mother died, Robinson says the only way to get Sugar back to normal was to take her to the funeral home and let her say goodbye.
For a while, she was her old Peki-weenie self again.
She growled at the firefighters when she visited Robinson's sister, Darlene Huffman, at the fire department. But she kept her tail wagging the whole time.
She wrestled with Robinson's other dog, a Shih tzu/poodle mix named Boogeyman. He was an abused dog who didn't know what to do with a toy when he came to live with them. Sugar taught him how to play.
Then, in early August, the day after her picture appeared in the Hickory Daily Record as part of the pet contest, Sugar started acting sick again. Over three days, Robinson took her to the emergency vet four times. The doctors couldn't find anything wrong with her.
Sugar's regular veterinarian did an X-ray and thought he saw something in her intestines. She went into surgery Aug. 14, the same day she turned a year old. The vet couldn't find anything in the dog's intestines but he wanted to keep her overnight because she still wasn't eating or drinking.
The next morning, Sugar was dead. Robinson says the doctor couldn't tell her what happened, that there were no tell-tale symptoms of cancer or poisoning.
"I told him that she just wanted to go be with her granny," Robinson says.
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