The last few months have been really hard. To say we were not prepared to lose Mackenzie is an understatement. Having been an emergency vet for now over 21 years I see cancer all the time. I’ve told thousands of owners their pets had cancer, I’ve been diagnosed cancer in 11/20 Scotties I’ve had in my lifetime and I’ve even been told I had cancer, but it NEVER gets easier to watch one of my own go through it. I noticed Mackenzie seemed a little less like herself around Thanksgiving, but her physical exam and bloodwork were all normal. On New Year’s Day, my in-laws were in town and they said “Mackenzie was the last one to get up this morning”…. As a mom/vet, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. My six-year-old beautiful brindle Scottie was the last one up? She is my lizard/squirrel/bird-chasing warrior who has never been sick a day in her life. I went over to her and went to grab her beard and muzzle to kiss her head and my hands went over her lymph nodes and they were huge. I palpated all of her lymph nodes and they were all huge and I knew at that moment she had cancer. She was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoma and started on aggressive chemo as well as other treatments immediately. When I realized she wasn’t responding to chemo and that we wouldn’t have her the expected 6-11 months I made a super quick trip to South Carolina.. I’m so grateful to my longtime friend Linda Hill and Lisa Medlin Mann and Scottish Terrier Rescue of the Southeast. This guy became a MacMiller about 2 weeks before we lost Mackenzie. He was rescued from a horrific situation where the breeder literally said “I didn’t have the heart to put him in the trash so I was going to leave him out and let him freeze to death”. It was going to be -4 in Alabama that night. He had an angel from a Cavalier rescue who scooped him up and took him along with the mama and litter of Cavaliers. The sweet Cavalier mama took him in and made him part of her litter. He was six weeks old and weighed 1 lb. He is now 17 weeks old and weighs in at 9.7 lbs. We went through many names before finally landing on Maverick. He’s the underdog who didn’t look like he was going to make it, but he’s a fighter. He’s not 100%, but that is okay with us. He ADORES his BIG cat brother, Rhett Butler, he loves his daddy and his cousin Reid (really hard to get both of them to sit still for a picture), and he really wants his big brother Collin to love him and he got to meet Mackenzie before God needed her back. He’s the funny, loving, adorable ‘patch’ that our broken hearts needed. Welcome Maverick Nash MacMiller (aka Breeze).