Blood on the walls

My housekeeping routine now includes cleaning blood off the walls and floors. It’s from the tumour on Sam’s neck. It’s not Truman Capotesque quantities of blood, just enough to splatter on the walls when he shakes. There are trails of blood droplets on the floors too. I clean it up regularly, but the next day there’s more. I look at the tumour…it’s an open wound. Not gushing blood, but oozing. It freaks me out to look at it, but I look at it compulsively. I think the tumour is growing…or maybe it’s just more open and gaping than it used to be.

The vet opened it up last month, shaved the fur, removed the scab, prescribed antibiotics. That made it smell better but look much worse. Now it doesn’t smell so good either. I’ve been putting hydrogen peroxide on it to try to keep it clean. It’s not going to go away: the vet says he’ll have it for the rest of his life.

He poops on the floor daily now. Sometimes twice a day. In the beginning, he used to look embarassed when he did that. Now…he just casually does it anywhere; it’s like he’s forgotten he’s supposed to go outside. Sometimes he just poops on his way up the stairs and doesn’t even seem to notice.

I’m taking him back to the vet on Monday so she can monitor his anemia and look at his bloody tumour and prescribe more anti-anxiety drugs. The drugs don’t seem that effective anymore. He has had some good nights since she increased his dosage, but he has a lot of bad nights too. Sometimes I sleep through the bad nights, but I can always tell in the morning if he’s had a bad night by how much fur there is in the tub and on the stairs. When he’s anxious he climbs in and out of the bathtub repetitively and up and down the stairs over and over again. It has only been 3.5 weeks since the dosage was increased, and she did tell me that I wouldn’t see the full effects for 4-6 weeks, so maybe there’s still some improvement ahead of us.

I sometimes wonder if I’m making him stay alive, and why. We drag ourselves from milestone to milestone: first his 14th birthday, then his 100th birthday in dog years, then the first snowfall, then his 14th-and-a-half birthday. I don’t know why. Sometimes I wish he would just go to sleep and never wake up.

But then we go outside for a walk, and he’s a puppy again, happily exploring his world with a bounce in his step, a twinkle in his eye and a wagging tail. I think that’s why I keep him alive – because sometimes he seems genuinely happy. Or maybe it’s because all this physical and mental deterioration is gradual…it’s always just a little bit worse than what he and I have already gotten used to. There’s never any dramatic change that clearly tips the scales between letting him live and letting him die. Or maybe it’s because I’m selfish: I’d rather suffer slowly with him than take that sudden plunge into grief all alone.