We’ve been doing the quality of life assessment every evening for the past week. There are good days and we don’t feel we are ready to call it the end yet, but there are also bad days and having daily discussions about how he’s really doing are helping us get onto the same page and come to terms with making the decision to give him a good death. We looked at our schedule and set early November as a target date. We will be leaving on a trip to visit family in mid-November. We don’t want to risk something happening while we’re away, and the sitter had a lot of anxiety watching him the last couple of times. We decided it’s best for everyone to let him go before that trip. Plus, then we’d be getting out of the house and have some distractions after having to say goodbye to our baby bear. It would give us plenty of time to prepare and check off his bucket list items. Of course, this is assuming he doesn’t take a downturn between now and then. We will continue to do his daily assessments, and if we feel we’re at risk of getting toward more bad days than good we will call it earlier.
He is eating now that we’ve switched his food which makes us optimistic, but he won’t touch the old food so we haven’t been able to do a slow transition and he is getting an upset tummy. We’ve had to give him anti-nausea meds and feeling sick had him not wanting to do a whole lot, so we had to call a few of these days bad days as a result. We’ve learned that feeding him multiple smaller meals through the day and alternating them with some bland chicken helps.