Milo

Our dog, Milo, a 52-pound goldendoodle, is starting to falter. He is 13½. It’s his legs that are going, not his happy attitude, not his appetite or his heart. Whenever he slips on the hardwood floor and falls down, or doesn’t quite make the jump onto the couch or into the car, he looks at us with a puzzled expression, like he doesn’t understand what’s happening. We don’t really either. He trots along on his daily walk as usual—though there’s that dragging front left foot, which the other day started bleeding as the asphalt ground away at his nail, right down to the quick. On Sunday, on a longer hike, he started stumbling on the downhills; we finally leashed him, lest he lose his footing entirely and tumble down the steep hillside. He’s sleeping more, and has taken to occupying the folded fleece blanket at the bottom of the stairs leading to my little office-loft. He very rarely comes up the stairs anymore, but he lifts his head whenever I come down, inviting a neck scritch. I know he will die. It breaks my heart. And so I’m trying to use this end time to feel all the love and sweet pleasure—his, mine, bundled together. As Ted Kooser describes in his poem “Death of a Dog,” I fully expect our house to come unmoored and float away when Milo is no longer here to hold it down. But for now—and, I hope, quite a while longer—he continues to provide crucial ballast: love, connection, trust, joy in living. 

Here is my first post about him, from seven years ago, complete with baby photos.

Postscript 3/24: We took Milo to the vet today, and she prescribed some pain meds, thinking it might just be pain from arthritis that's bothering him. So we'll try that and see if he responds. Here's hoping.

Postscript 4/25: Turns out, I was wrong about him being 13½: he's only 12½. He will be 13 this year. Which, maybe, means he'll live an extra year? One can hope... Or at least, I can. And do. As for the pain meds, they didn't seem to have much effect, except in the gastro-intestinal category, negatively. So we went for the vet's second recommendation: CBD. And it's working a charm! Milo seems peppier, more his normal self. It could simply be that he's learning to tolerate his changed condition—the new normal. But no: he seems much more like his old self—with the exception of the dragging foot, which we stick in a booty now when we go for our walks. He doesn't seem to mind. Yay for CBD!