Gail here.
There is no good way of saying this. I'll tell it straight.
Late Wednesday afternoon (only a few minutes after I pressed the 'publish' button on the blog post) Hamish fell into a fit. A couple of hours later, he seemed to have stabilised, but then at about eight thirty came another seizure, and after that he went into a downward spiral of convulsion after convulsion interspersed with a sort of unhinged frantic pacing in circles around the room. After several calls to the emergency vet, at three o'clock in the morning I drove him the short distance to the veterinary surgery and made perhaps to the hardest decision of my life, to sign the consent form for 'humane euthanasia'.
He was such a grand little dog. He brightened my life for over a decade. I can't quite accept yet that he really is gone, the end came so suddenly. I keep hearing noises in the house and thinking 'what's he up to', and I find I don't know what to do with the time when I should be taking him for walk.
This photo below is last one I took of Hamish, crossing the road on his way back home after his final stroll.