Still a two-dog family

When it came down to making the decision yesterday, I just couldn’t do it. Yes, she’s in pain. Yes, she sleeps all the time. Yes, her legs sometimes fall out from underneath her. Yes, her coat looks horrible no matter what I do. No, she doesn’t get up to greet people at the door any more. Yes, she’s covered with fatty deposits and tumors. But the last couple of days I’d been giving her two Rimadyl instead of one, and she’s had some alert moments. She was awake and social the whole two hours (!) the vet and the tech were here weighing, getting to know, and giving shots to the other pets. I just… I just couldn’t do it. I felt like too much of a shitheel saying “put this dog to sleep, I know she doesn’t seem like it right now but she’s really in a lot of pain.”

So we’ve added another pain reliever to combine with the Rimadyl (which I might be misspelling, I’m too lazy to get up and go look at the bottle in the other room). And they clipped her toenails. But she didn’t get her yearly shots, so even if we get another month or two, we probably won’t get a year. We’re going to re-evaluate in about ten days, which is when she should run out of Rimadyl, and see how she’s doing then. And until then, she’ll just be as comfortable and pain-free as we can make her (and will have a full belly, because with the pain meds we’ve got to feed her twice a day — good thing being old hasn’t affected her appetite).

And pain is really the issue I have with it — I don’t mind if she’s sleeping all the time, as long as she’s not in pain. I don’t mind if she looks like a homeless bum with the messy fur, as long as she’s not in pain. I don’t mind if she’s gone deaf and barks at nothing for five minutes at a time, as long as she’s not in pain. She’s such a good, noble, goofy good girl; I can’t watch her hurt so.

(Watch — this new pain medication will work fantastically, she’ll live for another two years, and you can all tease me about that time I almost had her put to sleep.)