With a sister battling breast cancer, and a daughter who is BPD and bipolar, this is a very emotional time for me right now, so I’m not going to read the thread. If I did, I’ve no doubt I’d have tears running down my face right now. But I’ll answer the question.
When I was five, we got a miniature French Poodle. I loved him. Probably close to as much as I loved other family members. I remember the nightgown I was wearing the night we got him (as a Christmas gift, though it was a bit after Christmas).
When he was three or four years old, he was hit by a car, and both of his front legs were broken. He healed nicely, but when he got old, arthritis settled into those front legs. He also, with age, got cataracts. Then brain damage.
There came a time when we could no longer let him out into the (fenced) back yard because my father’s much younger German Shepherd lived there, and he would try to play with the Poodle, and the Poodle was much too old to want to play. The Shepherd, however, never understood this. So we would let the Poodle out into the (un-fenced) front yard to ‘do his business’, which he would do, then get back up onto the front porch to be let back inside.
One night, the Poodle had been outside an extraordinarily long time, and we heard horns honking outside the house. We went outside to find our poor doggie wandering around in circles, in the middle of the road, not able to find his way back to the yard.
The vet said it was a form a brain damage, unrelated to the blindness induced by the cataracts. He was 15 years old. I was 20. We made the decision to have him put down. I agreed it was the right thing to do, but I cried.
