PUPDATE

It’s been a while since we talked about my dogs. It’s much easier to tell you about my dogs, because, unlike my children, they don’t mind when I write about them. You give up any notions of privacy when you poop on the lawn.

They’re doing fine, but they require a lot of work and money. Asta is now 13 and a half. She’s blind, deaf and lumpy. The lumps are nothing to worry about, but her constant panting is. I thought she had a heart condition, but the vet says it’s laryngeal paralysis. What that means is that the muscles around her larynx have stiffened up, making it difficult to breathe when she’s hot, tired or anxious. It can be corrected by surgery, but at her age, she’s not much of a candidate. The solution is to keep her calm and cool, while still ensuring she gets enough exercise. She’s also incontinent, and so we have her on medication – expensive medication that tightens up her nether regions. Blind, deaf, leaky and short of breath doesn’t sound like a great way to go through life, but she seems happy enough. She spends a lot of time gazing out the window, except it’s not a window, it’s a wall. Bless.

Then there’s Duey.

Apart from the carpet, and the general mess, those antibiotics cost $10 a pill, and Duey ate 8 of them. I have to coat them in peanut butter to get Asta to eat them, but Duey managed to jump up on the counter, pull the blister pack down to the floor, and chew off the wrappers. This is the same dog that ate a pound and a half of dark chocolate two Christmases ago, sending him to the hospital. A year before that, he got into a friend of Aidan’s backpack and ate two marijuana muffins. That incident put him to sleep for 3 days, and then he dropped out of high school.

The real problem here is that Duey can’t manage without Asta. They are 6 years apart, and when we brought Duey home as a puppy, he just assumed that Asta was his new mother. He can’t handle it when we have to take her somewhere on her own, like the vet, and he wanders around crying like the big baby he is. She, on the other hand, just tolerates him.

I honestly don’t know what we are going to do when Asta inevitably moves on. I suppose we could get another dog, but it can’t be a puppy, otherwise we will be locked into a never-ending cycle of older dogs leaving younger ones behind. Maybe we’ll adopt a middle-aged dog, a nice, mild-mannered pooch who keeps to himself and just says no to drugs.

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