On Aug 11, 2024 our basement AirBnB guests came up to say hello to Gizmo and pet him for a good while as we chatted, which he loved. He then took a long nap on the bed with me.
Gizmo cuddled up with us as we laid in bed that evening and took a look at the quality-of-life resources that his physical therapist had sent us a few weeks back when we were in a downturn. We’d been putting it off, but decided we really needed to start looking at him objectively and think about how to figure out the right time. The vet as well as a friend from the Berner community recommended Lap of Love for at-home euthanasia, and they have some great resources on their site for how to figure out when the time is right. We read this page and watched both videos: How Will I Know It’s Time | In-Home Euthanasia (lapoflove.com). It really helped give me the language to use for my thoughts and feelings on the subject. Colin also said the videos really helped his emotional journey in starting to come to terms with making the decision and not waiting too long. We’re in the uncertain zone where the decision as to whether to give him a good death now or later is subjective and there’s no right answer, and we are still on the side of the zone where we believe we have more good than bad. We do want to make the decision to let him go before he crosses that line into more bad than good. We don’t want to wait until he tells us it’s time because that will mean we waited too long and he is suffering.
We did this online quality of life scale calculator: Quality of Life Scale for Pets online calculator (journeyspet.com) and scored a 38, which kind of matches our gut feel right now. We also printed out the daily quality of life assessment sheet and the calendar tracker so that we could watch his trends day over day more objectively. We adjusted the daily assessment scale to what makes the most sense for Gizmo and us, and I used my blog entries as a guide to go back and assign smiles and frowns to the days on the calendar looking back since we got the diagnosis. Since the blog doesn’t cover every day it’s not perfectly accurate, but it gave us some sense of the positive/negative trends. We’ll start calculating each day more accurately moving forward. We also realized that sentiment is relative. July has a lot of smiles, but he was still limping more than usual a lot of those days. For another dog, those might be bad days. For Gizmo, we have a bit of a different frame of reference given his life-long struggles. We’d also just come off of a really bad week at the end of June so even if not everything was good, they were better than the days before. We’re taking it with a grain of salt, but do generally feel it’s been more good than bad. We also made Gizmo’s bucket list. There are some things we would have liked to have put on here that he just can’t do anymore, but we feel very good about this list. We’re confident that we’ve already been making sure he’s lived a full life; we just want to make sure we tick a few more things off so we won’t have any regrets and will feel we spoiled him thoroughly in the end. These are really great tools for us to discuss and align and track progress over time more objectively.
These tools are helping us come to terms with the decision and find the right time for us and Gizmo. Though it seems like every time we move toward coming to terms with making the call, Gizmo protests and gives us reason to think we should keep going. Today he’s been getting up and moving around on his own. It gives us hope to see him refusing to stay down, but we watch his back leg drag and limp in obvious pain and it’s frustrating. I went to bed, and Gizmo was quick to get up to hobble over and nuzzle me to let me know I forgot to give him his delicious bedtime joint supplements.
We adjusted the standard rating scale based on Gizmo’s personality, and added a category for ourselves to check in on how we’re feeling. We plan to also do the JOURNEYS online calculator once a week for another numeric trend.
After doing the Lap of Love daily assessment, we discuss whether it was a good or bad day and mark it on the calendar. If it isn’t an obviously good day with things we can point to, then it’s a bad day. We don’t want to count days where he’s mostly just existing as good and paint a rosy picture unjustly to avoid the decision.
We’re counting the beach and snow trips we took recently when we started on his bucket list before actually having it written down. I’m not counting the cheeseburger I gave him last week though; he can get another one of those before we mark it off 🙂
I’ve denied him pig ears his whole life since as a puppy he would growl and guard those things like they were the most precious thing on earth. It’s time to let him have one.
If you’re wondering about the hero image on the posts page for this entry, I made it with Adobe Firefly after watching the lap of Love video talk about being on denial island.