My dog Logan is twelve years old. I adopted him six years ago, and since then he has rarely left my side.
Almost a year ago, I had to put my other senior dog to sleep after he began to have clustered seizures, the final ones being incredibly violent. That decision, though painful, was easy to make as those seizures were horrifying and my wife and I could not bear to watch him suffer like that.
With Logan, it's harder.
His decline began with general incontinence. He would pee and poop in his sleep, which, though gross, was something we could simply clean and he was an otherwise happy dog.
Then his walking slowed because of arthritis. He just can't handle the long walks we used to take and now I can barely walk slow enough to keep his pace.
A couple of months ago, he started getting picky with his food, which was unlike him as he used to eat absolutely anything. We switched his diet multiple times to whatever he would eat, but lately getting him to eat is a chore, and he won't eat anything of nutritional value.
My wife is a veterinary technician and re-ran some bloodwork on him a couple of days ago. His kidneys are in rough shape from the medications he has been on. She says the values are in line with patients she's had that were in stage 3 renal failure.
She has discussed all of this with the doctors she works with and they agree that the time is soon, but believed we may be able to have a few more weeks with him.
But my wife and I talked it out, and we believe we are going to make the final decision on Sunday. As it stands now, he will only eat certain foods willingly and only under seemingly arbitrary conditions. The past two weeks, I've had to bathe him every other day or so because he would fall in his own poop. He gets up in the night and just pees. It almost seems like he can't control it anymore. Neither my wife nor I have seen him wag his tail for a while either.
It's hard because sometimes he perks up and will show excitement. Sometimes we will find something he wants to eat and he will gobble it down like old times. Though slow, he can still get up and walk, which we can see he still enjoys.
But overall the past two weeks have been painful and exhausting. He has already visibly lost weight and we don't want to see him starve to death. It's tiring to constantly have to clean up after him or bathe him when he can't really support himself in the tub. We don't want it to get to the point where we regret not having euthanized sooner.
Just as I am sure your dogs mean the world to you, I can't imagine life without him, but I don't think I can do this anymore. I am losing sleep and lately I have spent my commutes to work crying.
I guess I just need some objective validation from the outside. Am I doing what's best for my dog?
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from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/b7a0p1/am_i_making_the_right_decision_to_euthanize_my/
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