Sh*t Happens

It’s been a shitty week around here, and I can only wish I were being metaphorical.

I’ve mentioned before that we have a dog, a 14-year-old yellow lab, and at his age, we fully realize we are running on gravy time. The average lab lives 9-12 years, I’m told. He’s generally been fine up until now, slowing down, but essentially the same dog he’s always been. But now, we can see the endgame approaching.

He’s always been extremely reliable in that he never went potty in the house. Ever. He always came to get one of us to let him out. Last Monday changed all of that.

I woke up to find a serious shitstorm. He had left a big pile on the throw rug right beside the back door (his usual route to go outside). He must have done it between the time my wife left for work and when I got up for the day.

Then every time I’d clean it up and leave the room, I’d come back to another pile. I was about to have a meltdown. See, I’m not the one who generally tends to the dog’s maintenance, aside from letting him out. This was Sweetpea’s dog, and his care has remained under her domain. I’m extreeeeemely squeamish about handling poop. In fact, I’ve only changed one diaper in my lifetime and still remain traumatized by the experience. (It made an entertaining post though.) But I couldn’t leave it there on the floor for the next eight hours, so I had to do something.

Sweetpea’s usual MO for poop detail (inside or outside) is to put her hand in a plastic bag, pick up the offending matter, and pull the bag down off her hand, thus encasing the poop. That would not work for me. I’m not touching that stuff no matter how many layers of plastic are involved. She seems to have infinite patience for this stuff; maybe it’s because she’s dealt with small children all day for 30+ years.

Anyway, I took the rug outside and squirted it off with a hose, then hung it up to dry over a railing.

When I came back in, there was more. After I cleaned that, I finally got to sit down and peruse the internet, after which I came back out of my office to find even more. I was pretty much losing it by that point.

It took me a while to realize that it wasn’t always fresh work. I noticed he had stepped in some with his back paw, so what I was finding was where he had tracked it around. So I got him outside and hosed off his foot, butt, and general hind area. That solved the immediate problem.

The dog has gotten very weak lately. So when he goes to squat, he can only hold the pose for so long. Then he tires and sort of slides back down into his creation, thus doubling any cleanup efforts.

I was never so glad to see someone come in the door as I was to see Sweetpea that evening. We needed to pow-wow to come up with some solutions, because from what I could see, the entire focus of my retirement was now trying to keep the dog from shitting in the house.

One of the things we did was line a path through the living room with old towels, so in case of an accident, we could remove the piles quickly. Unfortunately, that wasn’t always easy; the boy is no longer simply dropping logs. He’s had some degree of diarrhea for the last two weeks, which was like one part Velcro, one part toxic waste, and smells like hot death. You probably ought to go buy stock in Febreze, because we’re using that stuff like crazy.

Of course, the towels never stay flat; they get rumpled up via dog and foot traffic, so our living room looks like a giant unmade bed. Add that to the area rugs we have all over the kitchen, because the dog has a hard time getting up (or even walking on) the tile floor. He’s prone to taking tremendous cartoon-like pratfalls where all four legs splay out as he thumps to the floor. He can still get back up, though. Sometimes he struggles, but he can do it when he’s sufficiently motivated (usually by food). But it’s a process.

Maybe we should just put down a tarp and make the whole thing look like an indoor Slip-N-Slide.

One night in the middle of last week, after Sweetpea was in bed, I saw the dog appear at the exit from the kitchen and assume the position in the hallway. I leapt from the sofa, going, “NONONONONO-outsideoutsideoutsideoutside…” and hustled him to the door. This was a big mistake because he left a trail of doots along the towel-brick road. I should have left him be where he was, standing on a plastic runner just inside the front door. That would have been a much easier cleanup. But all I could think of was to reinforce the “outside” part of the process and not tacitly signal that indoor pooping was OK.

Eventually, we realized that we could go buy some more plastic runners and substitute them in for the towels. Sweetpea did that yesterday. That makes cleanup easier, and the room looks much less rumpled.

All of this has led to a new normal.

Every morning, I get up to find a note from Sweetpea, informing me of the dog’s poop status, so I know what I might expect.

We found that, in discussing the subject and given the ever-changing nature of what the dog is producing, I suggested that we create a poop scale so that we needn’t get bogged down with descriptive details. So we created a 1-5 scale, where:

1 = Chocolate milk

3 = Pudding

5 = Lincoln Logs

This week, the scale went into effect.

(The “pork” had nothing to do with our subject today, just a note telling me I don’t need to take tonight’s dinner out of the fridge.)

To help with his stance, she bought a support strap, about 10 inches wide, with handles on both ends and padded with fleece, so when he hunches over outside, one of us can slip one end under him and pull up to keep him from falling back into his mess. He doesn’t like it much, but he tolerates it. So when he goes out, we have to go with him. I don’t know how this will work in the winter. Suffice to say, he won’t be waiting around at the door while we put on our coats and boots.

So now we have a dog who has trouble walking and getting up, gets scabby protrusions through his fur, and he’s half incontinent. (I say half because he never pees inside. I guess he can hold that better.) He can hardly see, and his hearing is diminished too. He sleeps about 22-23 hours a day.

I know what you may be thinking… that maybe it’s time to put him out of his misery.

We’ve considered that too, and it might come to that eventually. We’re keeping an eye out. He doesn’t seem to be suffering. He still has a voracious appetite. For whatever is going wrong, he still wants to eat all the time. And that brings its own problem because his “give me food” behavior is the same as his “let me out” behavior, so we don’t always know what he really wants. We just treat every action as “let me out” and go from there. This is how our typical evening’s activities play out:

·         After his and our dinners (and treats), we sit down for the evening.

·         Dog signals us.

·         We go to let him out. He goes to the Treat Bar.

·         We tell him no; he’s had his dinner and treats.

·         We all sit down again.

·         He gets up and signals again.

·         We told you, NO MORE FOOD. (He knows what this means.)

·         He takes the stance like he’s about to go.

See, NOW he wants to go out; he just wanted food first. Or, he’s hoping for a treat when he comes in (which Sweetpea often provides). We used to go through several rounds of this each night before he’d finally settle in. Now he’s done after the first cycle.

So, he still seems to be “him.” Despite bumbling around, he doesn’t seem to be in pain. He enjoys seeing his best human friends when they come over, and he certainly enjoys every meal. We don’t think it’s time to take any drastic measures yet.

But ask me again later if my quality of life is still so intimately tied to dog shit in another month or two.

Maybe it should be ME getting put out of misery.