We’ve had our dogs for 13 year [see above]. We got them when they were 6 weeks old and we had only been retired 6 weeks not what Mrs Summerhouse had in mind for our retirement she thought we were going to travel the world and then I showed up with two fluffy bundles and that was the end of our travel in retirement plans. They have been a joy and we have rarely regretted our decision to get dogs for the first time in our married lives.
I would say that they have given us 95% pleasure as against the 5% part of any stress they might cause. My view is that you’d be hard-pressed to find any other aspect of our retirement lives with a similar balance.
That’s the balance so far but I must admit that balance has changed somewhat for the worse over this last week or so. That was when Millie was struck down by a vestibular something or other ( a problem with the ear) and that dreadful sounding condition was the best of what the vet* diagnosed – stroke or tumour were other even more undesirable possibilities. All we knew was that it was quite heart-breaking seeing her collapse and stagger when she was walking to the point we had to stop taking her out.
Which in turn caused all sorts of problems in terms of walking her brother, Archie who wasn’t in any way debilitated and had absolutely no sympathy for his poorly sister. He wanted his daily two walks. So Mrs Summerhouse had the task of taking him on his own while my job was to stay at home with Millie. As I say much more problematic than we anticipated on account of, me at least, getting a severe dose of cabin fever. I hadn’t appreciated how important to my mental health our two walks (admittedly short – about 40 minutes in total) actually were. I had always known that exercise was an important aspect of a ‘successful’ retirement. Now I could experience this first hand.
Another thing vital to good mental health is sleep and that has been badly affected because we slept downstairs on the couch/es to supervise her and to make sure she and / or her brother didn’t try to climb up stairs which is their normal habit. Those couches might look quite comfortable but let me tell you…
Anyway I’ll cut to the chase. After more than a week she is improved, she is still falling over and her head is at a permanent tilt but she’s better than she was. Maybe because of her medication which she initially refused to take despite our many efforts to disguise it (being a bright dog she sussed them all out). Her brother was quite happy to eat it even though it wasn’t his. We have no idea what the future holds but we know they’re relatively old even for border collies who are generally long-lived, so, as we keep telling ourselves, we will have to take it a day at a time and other well-known clichés. With all our healths we’ve been quite lucky but we don’t want to hear the sound of pigeons coming home to roost, whatever that means.
*We had real problems getting her in the car and to the vets. She’s not a huge dog but we can’t lift her or carry her. We ended up putting her in an IKEA bag and transporting her that way. The vet more used to such challenges just picked her up and carried her in. I have two very large, black painful bruises from where I fell over trying to do the same later in the week for her return visit to the vet. Mrs Summerhouse told me not to try lifting her but I knew better.