Oscar is on four pills a day and hard of hearing and seeing. Some days, he won’t leave the house or eat. I am agonising over what to do next
I wrote about the melancholy of my dog’s gentle decline two years ago. Since then, progress towards the “good night” has been, well, less gentle. I imagine anyone who has been there could have tipped me off, but perhaps it was better not to know.
Oscar has degenerated from slow to terribly stiff, with weak, wobbly hindquarters; he has four pills a day and a monthly jab for his rheumatoid arthritis. For more stamps on his vet loyalty card (no, they don’t have one), he has had multiple teeth extracted plus a late-life castration, after developing hormone-related bum tumours. The indignity. He is hard of hearing and seeing and intermittently hard of thinking: I often find him barking in confusion at his own bed. Old age is a shipwreck, as an elderly lady once said to me in a Belgian supermarket, and he is sinking.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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