Saturday, July 15, 2006
Current mood: miserable

I don’t want to be the crazy bitch who forces medicine into my dog for the final months of her life. I want to be the lady who sits with her and pets her and comforts her.

Instead, at the moment, Alex views me as that asshole who keeps putting weird crap in her mouth and in her food.

Every 4-6 hours there’s something or other on the schedule that forces me to act like an idiot in her eyes… some days she won’t eat so I have to crush the pills, mix them with honey and smush the honey on her gums and tongue so she can’t spit out or avoid her medicine. We also have little tubes of liquid painkiller to squirt it on her tongue. She’s quite annoyed with us. We’re not even overdoing it; the vet discontinued most of her meds and pared us down to only the most essential, so as not to harass her any more than necessary.

She’s not “near the end” — the reason she avoids food is she now has an ulcer from all those years that she was on meds back when she had leukemia.

Lately she’s vomiting blood so all we can do is keep getting painkillers and antibiotics into her. Then last night she really wanted to eat, but the vet said I couldn’t feed her yet. :( Alex got really frustrated with me and threw a tantrum of sorts. She must think I’m a complete dimwit to “forget” to feed her 2 meals in a row.

4 am we get up and give her two medicines to coat her stomach, so that we can try feeding her at 6 am. 5 am I’m still awake and so is she, so I figure, Hey here’s a moment where I can sit and pet her and be her friend instead of doing something she hates. I go over to her to be with her, and she sees me coming and gets up and wobbles away to go hide from me.

So now she doesn’t want me to come near her because she feels like I’m just bad news.

It sucks being this kind of “mom”. On the other hand, if I stop giving her the painkiller she’ll have terrible stomach aches. If I stop giving her the stomach coating, or ignore the vet instructions in how/when/what to feed her, she’ll go into another horrific phase of vomiting blood. If I stop giving her the antibiotics she’ll die of a massive infection of the bladder & urethra. So I have to keep being the “crazy bitch” in her life.

But this isn’t the relationship I want to have with her for her final months. She doesn’t want to be with me. I miss having her regard me as a friend. I want to cuddle her. :(