Saying goodbye to a family member is never easy and the Halls’ basset hounds showed as much when they refused to leave the hospital bed of a five-month-old girl who suffered a stroke.
According to parents John and Mary Hall, Nora was born prematurely and spent her first six weeks in the intensive care unit.
The stroke hit Nora on the day she turned five months old in early April.
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Doctors diagnosed the infant with pulmonary hypertension, which can be fatal in children.
“She has not been responding to the treatments they have tried for her pulmonary hypertension because her vasculature throughout her body is just so tiny and narrow that there is not much for the medicine to work with,” wrote the Halls.
As a result of her stroke, the Halls said both sides of Nora’s brain were damaged and her vital organs were shutting down.
“We were told that the Nora lying here with us today is not the Nora that we brought in to the hospital. Her stroke has already taken away our sweet girl who is able to giggle and smile at us,” they wrote.
The family decided to take Nora off life support last weekend and photos of the family’s dogs comforting Nora during her last few days have garnered international attention.
In their final online update, the Halls wrote: “Yesterday at around 3:45pm, our sweet baby Nora sighed a little sigh and breathed the breath that was her last. She died with her puppies at her feet and while being held close in the arms of her parents as they sang to her and caressed her and told her how very much they loved her. She went without pain or fear.”