My Craita

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THE SPIDER'S DEN - CRAITA SHRINE

My Beautiful Girl, my Craita

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A visual representation of my undying devotion to Craita.

For Craita

Let me take away your pain - 09/22/11:50PM

I had surgery this morning, and every time I do, the part that stresses me out most is the IV.

I have a pretty high pain tolerance, and I didn't used to have this problem at all. But a few surgeries ago, the nurses couldn't hit my vein. I got poked around ten times, and each time they'd move the needle around under my skin trying to find it before giving up and trying somewhere else. Ever since then, IVs have hurt unbearably, and there always seems to be some kind of struggle getting one in. Today was the same. They couldn't get my vein, and it hurt like hell.

Then I remembered how many times you had to have an IV.

I started thinking about whether it hurt you too, and suddenly I couldn't stop picturing you going through that over and over again. I teared up, and the nurse apologized because she thought she had hurt me so badly she made me cry. I told her I had yawned and that my eyes were just watering.

I couldn't get the image of you in pain out of my head after that.

You shouldn't have spent a single second in pain. You shouldn't have even spent a single second uncomfortable. I wish I could have taken every bit of it from you. I wish I had gotten cancer instead of you.

I keep wanting to believe you weren't hurting as much as I am afraid you were. That maybe the needles didn't bother you the way they can bother humans, maybe your medicines helped keep the pain of your sickness numbed down, maybe you were mostly just tired. But I know part of that is me trying to make it easier on myself, and that doesn't feel fair to you.

I know some of it probably hurt. I know you were tired for a painful reason. I know your body was going through so much more than I wanted to admit while you were still here.

I'm so sorry I tried to save you, but most of all, I'm sorry I failed.

CLICK FOR CRAITA'S MUSIC PLAYLIST

Craita was born on May 15, 2015. She was never meant to be mine. She belonged to my mom at first, and I was only a teenager back then, but I loved her from the moment I met her. The first words I ever said to her were in Spanish. My mom had been told she was a French Bulldog, but as she grew up, it became increasingly obvious that wasn't true. She was such a weird little dog, full of strange little quirks, both physically and mentally. She barely grew at all. I remember at one point having a conversation with her about how she was definitely not a Frenchie, and there was not going to be some magical day where she suddenly grew up and looked like one. She just stopped growing altogether, and she stayed our tiny little puppy forever. We thought she was invincible. She was so weird and so sturdy in her own strange way that somehow we convinced ourselves she would just keep going forever. We used to joke that she would be one of those dogs who somehow made it past twenty, one of those ancient little rat-looking things, because she did have some rat qualities to her. We had no idea how badly her body had been set up against her from the beginning. I had no say in where she came from, but looking back, it is obvious to me that whoever bred her did not deserve a cent for what they were doing. She had health problems from such a young age due to a complete lack of care for what genes were getting passed down. The first real scare came after she was spayed. She developed a horrible infection in her belly. She barely complained, she just seemed sad. I opened the door to let the girls outside and noticed blood dripping from her surgery site. I panicked and called my mom. We rushed her to an emergency vet, and they had to operate again to clean out the infection growing inside her. It was bad. I could tell by the way the vets spoke that they were trying to be careful with us. But she made it. While she was scared and hurting, she bit one of the vets. She had gotten all of her vaccines only about a week earlier, but apparently that had not been enough time for the rabies vaccine to fully take effect. That led to the biggest fucking bullshit. Right after surgery, my baby had to be quarantined for two weeks. We weren't allowed to bring her home. I thought about her constantly. I kept counting down the days until she could come back to us. I knew she had to be scared, alone and locked in a cage somewhere while she was already hurting and recovering. But she survived that too. We finally got our little angel home, and somehow she went right back to being her playful, happy self. She still wasn't technically ours back then. I remember one weekend when Bugs and I went out, and my parents happened to leave at the same time. They figured the girls would be fine on their own with enough food and water, so we didn't even know they had left until we were already gone. When we came home, Craita's eye was bulging out of her face. It looked horribly painful. Once again, my baby was hurting. It was the middle of the night. My parents weren't home. Bugs and I didn't know what to do, and we waited too long before taking her in because of the time. I regret that deeply. Knowing now how much pain she must have been in, I hate myself for letting her be in pain for even a single hour. It turned out to be glaucoma. We tried everything we could, but nothing brought the pressure in her eye down enough, and eventually it had to be removed. When she came home after surgery, she did something I still can't think about without wanting to cry. She stood by the door and cried and cried. Usually, she would do that when we left. My mom told us she would would wait for us and cry because she wanted us to come back. But this time we were already there! She was so drugged, confused, and in pain that she didn't understand we were standing right beside her. We tried holding her, we talked to her,we tried to comfort her. She would just go back to the door and cry for us. It broke our hearts. But then, within just a few days and just like she always did, she bounced back. She became our little pirate. Happy as ever, playful as ever, pure as ever. Just this constant little ray of sunshine. Not long after that, Bugs and I had to leave the country. We had come up with the idea for oneway.exe, but if we were ever going to afford making it, I needed to be able to work. We left for Mexico for three months, and being away from the girls was miserable. We set up dog cameras so we could see them, but it wasn't enough. One night, I checked my phone and found missed messages from my mom asking who we had taken Craita to for her eye the first time. The messages were already hours old, my mom was asleep by then, and I panicked. All I could think was that something had happened to Craita's only remaining eye and everyone was waiting around while it got worse, exactly like Bugs and I had mistakenly done the first time. I had warned everyone about it, I had stressed how important it was. And now it was happening again. That was when I realized how badly I needed her. I needed Craita to be mine. I couldn't trust anyone else to take care of her the way I believed she deserved to be cared for. I can't blame my parents. They had never been prepared for how difficult and expensive caring for such genetically fucked-up little dogs could become. But I was willing to do all of it. From around that point forward, our lives became Hell in a lot of ways, much of it in pursuit of making oneway.exe possible. We had a rushed wedding surrounded by people who might as well wish us dead by now, if not worse. Our girls weren't there, even though I desperately wanted them to be. Some of the many sacrifices we made for our dream. The very next day, I got the call that Craita had gone completely blind. Her treatments weren't working. The pressure wasn't going down. Her remaining eye would have to be removed too. I was devastated. It was almost impossible not to think about all the ways we had failed her. All the ways things might have been different if we had simply been there the whole time. If she had already been mine. By then, I think my mom understood too. Naina and Craita needed to be ours, and we needed them. She let us have them, and I will always be grateful to her for that. Around late 2022, we moved out of my parents' home, and Naina and Craita fully became our girls. Then Naina was diagnosed with cancer in 2023. We were terrified that we were going to lose her almost immediately, but our little warrior pulled through. I think that gave me a false confidence when Craita eventually got sick. Naina had survived something terrifying, so some part of me believed Craita could do the same. But Craita's cancer was so much worse. So much worse. Looking back now, I can see how deeply in denial I was. Life kept getting worse in so many other ways, but the girls stayed happy. They were always such happy little girls. Even while we were miserable, they weren't. And now we are even more miserable without her. In January 2026, Craita was diagnosed with a Grade 3 mast cell tumor. I was so fucking stupid to be as hopeful as I was. She made it to May 31st, barely more than two weeks after her eleventh birthday. My last words to her were in Spanish. I hate myself for not doing more. I'm struggling even to type this now. There is so much more I want to write about. Her birthdays, the miserable and painful last year we had, the betrayals, the constant scares, the way her belly started filling with fluid. The way her happy, playful days suddenly disappeared. The times during that last week when we thought she was dying, only for her to pull through again, the tiny moments we grabbed onto because we thought they meant something good, the signs that were telling us what was happening while we desperately convinced ourselves they meant something else. All the little ways her little body was telling us this was the end. I still can't hold all of it in my head at once without feeling like I need to die. My little ray of sunshine, I wish I had been the person you deserved.
I love you forever and ever and ever until I die even even past that.