I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of “borrowed happiness” lately. When people know something bad is going to happen, like a terminal diagnosis or someone bound to be fired on work, they say they’re on borrowed time. If you can find some joy before pending devastation, is that borrowed too? To borrow is to take with the intention of returning. But I’m not sure if time, or happiness, is something you can ever get back. It’s ours for…
I spent the better part of last week crying over my dog. Like, really crying. The kind of crying that almost sounds like laughing if you don’t know the context. It’s a cruel trick on the body, because your muscles flex the same. When I wasn’t crying, I leaned on friends who were there to catch me. I told her how fabulous of a dog she is, and what her friendship has meant to be. I laid it on real…
My anxiety often leads me towards ridiculous fears. I’m not proud to admit how many times I’ve diagnosed myself with skin cancer or an irregular heartbeat. It’s easy for my brain to create fiction that’s much scarier than truth. But my heart is breaking as I type this, because I was right when it came to Pascale. Yesterday a MRI revealed a mass growing out the base of her skull. It started in the bone, and is growing into her…
My Pascale girl is not quite right. It started about two weeks ago, maybe more. At first she had a big hacking kind of cough, the kind that would make her regurgitate water after she drank. She’s gotten kennel cough before and fought it off on her own, but after about four days the hack wasn’t getting much better so I made a vet appointment for her. The day I made the appointment, she started acting head shy as well….
Last week, I said goodbye to my perfect spaniel. After I wrote the post outlining the details of his cancer, I was flooded with messages of support and love. Those notes gave me so much comfort. Both in knowing that I’m not alone with the immense struggle that is deciding when to release a beloved pet, but also that because everyone echoed that I’d know when it was time… and that it was probably not too soon. I was completely…
A lot happened in my blogging absence this summer. Some of it was fantastic, but a lot of it was not. I promise to update on happier things soon, but something that’s especially been weighing on my mind this week is Eliot’s health. I got Eliot, the most beautiful dog I’ll ever known, for my 21st birthday. All of my other dogs have been rescues, but Eliot is the embodiment of my deep rooted love for purebred dogs. In his…
Although I expected conversation to spring out from the post I published yesterday about flying with my large ESA dog (I mean I thought there were things to discuss… that’s why I wrote it!), I admit that there were both more total and more negative comments than I expected. Usually I try to respond to people one-off in my comments section, but felt this subject deserved a its own follow-up post. After my experience flying, I felt pretty uneasy about…
Both of my dogs are technically Emotional Support Animals, which are similar but different from a service dogs. An emotional support animal or ESA, is not trained to perform any function. Instead, they provide emotional support (it’s almost as if the title tells the purpose…) to their humans who suffer from psychological disorders of some kind. If you’ve read this blog for a long time, you’re probably not surprised to hear I have a psychological disorder… and though I probably…
Today I need help from my reader hive mind, because y’all are smarter than me on almost every topic. See, I have a problem with my best girl, Pascale. Ever since moving to California, I’ve had to adjust the dog’s schedule completely. Pascale is the one who’s taken this adjustment the hardest. Previously, she was used to a big backyard that she spent about 1 hour in in the morning unsupervised and another hour or so in the evening when…
In the past six months, Eliot has turned into a much older dog than he was a year ago. Earlier this year, he lost his hearing seemingly overnight. I feel like one week he was coming when I whistled, and the next I was trying to teach him hand signals for “come.” He’s not the first deaf dog I’ve had. BT couldn’t hear or see for the last year of her life, maybe more. Though Eliot losing his hearing didn’t bother…
I’ve written about The Little Prince on this blog before. I wrote about how Tim’s crooked path led me to discover the book (as many other things I’ve discovered), and how it helped grieve the loss of him. The words in that little children’s book gave a different meaning to death, and I needed them at the time. I keep them with me, but that’s not all I took from the book. There’s a passage in The Little Prince with the prince…
This morning on Facebook I was nominated by a friend to do one of those 5 day Facebook posting challenges. Now I typically hate those kind of things, but this one was about dogs… and well, I love dogs. Because I cannot follow directions, I modified the rules to suit my fancy. As I typed up probably my longest Facebook status ever, I thought no one is ever going to read all of this… if only there was a platform for long…