How do you know it’s time
Our current 16 year old good boy has the following issues:
- chronic kidney disease (stage 2/3)
- High blood pressure
- Heart murmur (no surgery)
- Only A few teeth left (can’t do dental surgery per above)
- Canine dementia/sundowning (somewhat managed with gabapentin/melatonin)
- corneal calcification started about a month ago, is really bothering him. We took him to two different eye specialists, both noted that even if we do debridement it will come back, so we have chosen to treat with calming / antibiotic eye drops for now and monitor. The second vet said this is chronic and will eventually become a quality of life issue and we will need to have a different conversation then.
Our dog does not have the same appetite he used to and cannot take the long walks he used to, which were his favorite thing. He whines and cries a lot now even with the gabapentin and eye drops and seems generally uncomfortable. The vet visits have started to really stress him out (didn’t used to), now needs to be put on trazodone in addition to the gabapentin and has started to wet himself at the vet. Unfortunately our vet retired and his practice was taken over by a private equity group, we have seen 3 different vets at that practice over the past year, so it’s not so simple as just talk to the vet.
My spouse likes to say as long as the dog is still eating he’s fine - But typing this all out I’m not so sure. It was actually the eye vet who started listing all his conditions and mentioning quality of life that made me think about this more.