Goodbye Fish!

I am sad to say that after 7 healthy years of traveling back and forth to college, living with Mom and Dad, getting married, moving to the apartment and finally to our current house, my pet goldfish died last weekend. This particular fish was orginially purchased from Wal*mart as a dorm warming present, my Freshman year at WSU. I used to travel back and forth with Fish in a water bottle. He outgrew his tank in a few years and we upgraded him to a bigger one. He spent the last five years in a ten gallon tank and brought joy to my morning routine. He was trained to come to the top of the tank each morning for food and followed my finger if I tapped on the glass. He has had bacterial infections before and has been treated with antibiotics many times.

He was a strangely clean fish as I only changed his filter and he did the rest of the cleaning. He would physically push rocks out of the way to clean up his space, this was a bit annoying at night when we could hear him all the way up the stairs, but the tank always stayed very clean. Last week I came home to find that the filter was completely clogged and fish looked "sad". This is the only way to explain it. I tore the whole filter apart and cleaned the whole thing. The next morning it was clogged again and fish was starting to look pretty bad. Matt brought home a new filter and we replaced the entire ten gallons of water. We placed fish in a bucket and started treating him for ick and bacterial fungus. We put him back into his tank two days later to see how he did and he seemed to perk up. He even ate some fish food and swam back and forth. At this point all his fins were pretty bad, but we thought he might make a recovery.

Unfortunately, Saturday morning I came down the stairs to find that Fish had passed away. I was headed out to my parents house so Matt took care of disposing of Fish. The empty tank is still sitting in our living room and although I am ok with the passign of my Fish, each morning I come down the stairs to the realization that I don't have to feed him.

Later that same day we also found out that Matt's childhood dog was put to sleep after no more help could be given to her health conditions. This was a difficult weekend for our little family as we sad good-bye to some very loved pets.

In this moment at this time I am still a bit sad about Fish...I'm sure we will get a new tank soon, and we've already been talking about what fish we like in the pet store. I am thankful for my supportive family and keep searching for answers to our current inability to have a baby added to our family.