Giving You A Solid Dose Of Bummer To Start Your Week.

So I woke up this morning to re-read a source I’ve been consulting often in the last year: Pawspice Quality Of Life Scale. I actually like the partner article from Dogster which gives a bit more detail about each item and targets dogs in particular. Although, if you’re like me you need the info for cats and dogs because it’s beginning to look as though I will have euthanized 3 pets in 12 months.

Yep. We said goodbye to Bambi on November 2nd of last year and I don’t think we have enough time left with Sweetie to get her past that mark for this year. So we will have said goodbye to THREE PETS IN ONE YEAR.

Y’all. Seriously. This has been rough.

It’s hard with Sweetie though because she is still just so sweet (it’s so easy to tell where she got her name) and she still comes for chin scratches and pets if you’re offering. But once you’re done? She goes back to one of her sleeping spots and sleeps the day away. I took her to the mountain this weekend and walked her around a bit and she enjoyed it but IMMEDIATELY started limping (she also has arthritis on top of a body full of melanoma) and you could tell this made her so sad. I could just see it in her eyes, Mom…I didn’t even make it half of a mile. I hate my old body.

Getting her to eat is just not happening anymore. She maybe eats one cup of food a day, and that’s a good day. And I try EVERYTHING. I cook more for her than I do my kids now as eggs are sometimes the only thing she’ll eat. She drinks, but barely. And she tries to sleep all day. I say “try” because you can also tell it’s hard for her to find comfortable positions so she gets up and paces and tries again in a different location or position. I hear her get up often through the night, only to settle back in a different location.

So I think it’s time. Time for us to really think about it (like I don’t think about it every day) and while I really don’t want to say this concretely in black-and-white type on my blog, it’s probably going to happen this week. I just felt like this weekend nothing really worked to get her perked up…even her favorite things just barely got her going for a short while. She didn’t even bark at the mailman when he came to the door. I just think she suffering quietly because she loves us, honestly.

I put a call out on Facebook this morning for vets who will do in-home euthanization. My vet is wonderful and he and his nurses always cry with us when we say Goodbye to our pets, and our pets don’t hate it there so it’s not traumatizing. But with Sweetie? I just feel like she’ll know and I just want us to do it here, on her bed, in our home. We rescued her before we were homeowners, she’s lived in every house we’ve ever bought. She smothered me through all of my pregnancies, failed and successful. She had this weird magnetism to me when I was pregnant. She’s not really a “cuddler” – she has a sleep bubble so she liked being NEAR us, but not ON TOP of us. Unless I was pregnant, then she would sleep curled up at my back making me sooooo uncomfortable!

I don’t know. It’s never easy but this one is really hard because her Sweetness shines through no matter how she’s feeling and it’s so hard to say “Goodbye” to that.

Sorry to bum you out today. Just think of me and my Sweetie, okay?