On the 18th we did a one-week check-in and his Journeys quality of life score again. It went up a little bit, but we’re still solidly in the uncertain zone where it could go wither way. We were still dealing with some nausea related to changing his food but mixing in some bland chicken and anti-nausea is helping. On the 21st he did his physical therapy, and I asked them to speed the treadmill up as I think they’ve been treating him more gingerly than necessary with him needing to work out and rebuild some muscle if we have any hope of making it to November. Even with the speed up, it is extremely slow. It just means he takes a few extra steps during each set and he isn’t running into the front and doing spins as easily. He was tired when we got home and took a nap. I thought the 22nd was going to be a good day. Gizmo was in a great mood and ate well when we woke up, but then we went to take him outside and he really struggled even with the cart. It could just be muscle soreness from the extra workout the day before, which is a good thing. His mood and appetite weren’t suggesting increased joint pain. We gave him some codeine anyway to help him be comfortable and let him rest most of the day. Looking back at the past week, it’s been mostly badays. First from the nausea, and now decreasing mobility and discomfort. If it isn’t one thing it’s another it seems. Colin and I are both feeling like waiting until November is too optimistic and pushing him too long, but Colin wants to track a little more before we make any decisions. We’ve had some bad streaks before and he comes out of them and gets good for a while again. We did agree to make stricter criteria for what we call a good day. We may have been on denial island and calling days good for little things. Moving forward, we will only call days good if all of these three things are true:
- He eats without feeling nauseous
- He is able to get up and walk a bit outside
- He does something he enjoys vs. just lay around in the bedroom and get a few cuddles between our work
We also agreed that we will need to make some calls to hospice and end of life vets and start deciding which one we will go with. I already think we will go with Lap of Love since we’ve been using their online resources, and I did get a recommendation from a member of the Berner community that has used them twice before and had good experiences. We’ll start there and call others if we feel we need to.