Rosie is declining

Our oldest dog, Rosie’s health is in decline. We adopted her in 2013, and at the time the agency told us they thought she was about 10 years old. That would make her 17, which is very old for a dog, even for a small dog. We don’t know for sure if she’s that old, but even if the adoption agency was off by a couple of years, she’s still a very old dog.

She sleeps a lot of the time now. She is eating fine but nonetheless has lost a lot of weight and has gotten very frail. She also sometimes gets confused and walks into corners and just stands there. She is nearly blind and deaf. She moves slowly and sometimes falls down, and can no longer get in and out of the doggie door. She also sometimes has trouble getting up.

Rosie recently had her first ever accident on the rug. Of all our dogs, she has always been our most reliably house trained. She’s never had a problem while traveling, or in a new house, or any other stressful situation. In this case, I don’t think she even fully understood what was happening.

Since we don’t want our carpets ruined, and she doesn’t need full run of the house for anything anyway, we’ve set her up in a pen on a blanket and potty pads between the kitchen and the living room, where she can rest but still be in the center of the house.

It’s cool in the mornings now, so I also put a heating pad down. I’ve also expanded the pen a little bit so that in the mid-day, when it’s warm, I can leave the sliding door open so she can go in and out on her own.

She can just barely manage to negotiate the little lip along the bottom of the sliding glass door. Luckily we don’t have many bugs in New Mexico, so I can get away with leaving the door wide open. Although soon it will be too cold.

She’s generally doing fine with the pen, although sometimes she feels trapped and puts her nose to the bars, and makes a high-pitched panicked noise. When that happens, I’ll just return her to her heating pad and tell her to go to sleep. Or I’ll carry her outside and she happily wanders around very slowly for awhile before eventually coming back inside.

She’s the most happy outside. And so am I. When I’m not inside packing boxes, I’m usually on my computer on the back porch. She sits with me whenever I’m on my computer. Once I left her a moment too long and she fell off the couch, so now I put pillows down if I need to run inside for something.

It’s going to get harder as it gets colder outside, because the yard is really the only place she’s happy (except she’s not happy if she’s gotten stuck out there, she really doesn’t like feeling trapped outside or inside). We’ll be in Tucson by mid-November where it will be a lot warmer, but it will be quite cold in Albuquerque by the time we’re able to leave.

As soon as she wakes up in the morning or from a nap, she starts in with her funny (but very insistent and compelling) cries. It’s almost like having a baby in the house. Shhhh – Rosie’s sleeping! She’s still sleeping through the night, luckily, but that may change soon. I’m glad I’m not working right now, because I do not know what would happen if she had to be left alone for 9 hours every day. I guess she’d spend a lot of time crying in her pen.

She’s clearly at the end of her life, but she doesn’t seem to be in pain. Just confused and frail.

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