My Poor Eighty Pound Baby

It's in her brown eyes. I can see it. I've been steeling myself the last week for what looks to be coming soon. She's been my big baby golden girl for so long. Over nine years. Nine loyal years. In the last two weeks, Maggie's turned a corner that her Deramaxx medicine can't fix, and it is getting worse. Her hips are quitting on her.

While she's been stiff over the last year, this is different. It is too sudden. Too severe. Something is happening in her body, that no amount of arthritic medicine can fix. The last two days she has come down with a brief case of the shakes. The worst is just watching her try to stand up. And it saddens me, when I think of how much of a people dog she is. She's stopped trying to go up the stairs at the end of the day to turn in for the night in our bedroom. Now she sleeps alone. In the last month she's stopped even trying to climb on the couch with us for a movie night. I tried to help her up two weeks ago, and she growled as she tried her best to climb up. She never growls.

We just came back from the vet. She had the works done: grooming, summer shave, medicine for ear infections, vaccinations, etc. I got a call today saying that she needed to come in for a urine sample. Something maybe up with one of her kidneys. I'm not sure I conveyed to the vet well enough the sudden changes I've seen. Her concern was in the numbers, but I don't need lab samples to tell me what's up. My girl is telling me with her eyes.

This week, I feel like she has aged two more years overnight. I'm dreading the possibilities. When it is her time, I just want her to pass peacefully as she sleeps doggy dreams in the night. I can't even give her a walk anymore, which she longs for, without the consequences being too hard on her the next day. Now the only place she runs is in her dreams, as I watch her body twitch and her paws go.

But I watched her today. The old girl still finds joy in things where gravity works with her rather than against her. She can still wiggle around in the cool green grass on her back and do the silliest paw dance with her feet straight in the air as she uses the grass as her back scratcher and the clouds as her dance floor. And she still loves to loaf in the warm morning sun. But the minute she sees me head from the porch into the house she's up to follow me back inside.

Forever my loyal friend.