Peace of Mind for Pet Parents Episode 051: Decline Doesn’t Mean Suffering: What Your Pet’s Body Changes Really Mean

Episode Transcript: 

Karen Wylie: Hello and welcome to Peace of Mind for Pet Parents. I'm Karen Wylie here as always with my dear friend Gail Pope. Today we're going to talk about something that almost no one really prepares pet parents for and that is the physical decline of our pets. It may be the hardest part of loving an aging or an ill animal.

It's not making the final decisions and probably not even saying goodbye but watching that physical decline day by day, week by week, month by month. Watching a once strong body grow thinner, watching mobility change, watching their appetite fluctuate as you try to adapt to wherever they are that day and watching that sparkle in their eyes change. So for many families, this is a moment where fear can easily set in and you start wondering, am I letting this go too far? Am I being selfish? Is my pet suffering?

So today we're going to unpack that a little bit and talk about why watching decline is so emotionally overwhelming to do and how to move through it differently with more clarity and less panic. Gail, guess where I'm going to ask you to go with this first question. With all the animals that you have cared for, what do you think makes physical decline so frightening for pet parents?

Gail Pope: You know, the first thing that occurs to me, and it's not even not going to be anything you might have expected me to say, but it did pop into my mind so it has to come up first otherwise it'll be forgotten, is that some people are almost natural born nurses. They have a motherly instinct to care for their animal. Maybe they've already cared for somebody in their family, I don't know, but some people adapt to the aging and decline of a loved one, whether on two legs or four legs, very easily.

They work hard and they get exhausted, absolutely, there's no arguing with that but they take to it  like a duck to water. It helps them, it helps their heart to be doing the work. Other people could fall into all sorts of different categories. There are those who are scared of the outcome and what that might be. They're living in the future. They're worrying and they're in a state of mild panic all the time. So that makes caregiving really difficult because you are in the moment doing a particular job, whereas your brain is saying, "Oh my God, what if this is getting to the end and what else can I do?"

Maybe there are some people in these situations that rush to the vet at every tick and turn. A general decline isn't something to be treated unless it's at a particular level where yes, obviously it may need something to help control. That obviously comes into the mobility area for a lot of dogs in particular, I think.

Does that kind of answer your question at all?

Karen Wylie: It absolutely does! The part I want to first pick up on is observing and seeing decline happening and our first reaction is, "There's something wrong. We have to fix it." "We have to stop it. Oh my God, what can we do?"

I think when you haven't been down this road before, you tend to be taking your pet to the vet very frequently because we're trying to keep them on the planet as long as possible. We're trying to stop the decline, slow down the decline. If we haven't experienced it ourselves to know, to have a, I guess, I want to say a broader acceptance of what's "okay" each day or each week— of what they can look like and still be okay. 

It makes it really hard because when we are taking them to the vet and we're saying, "Help! Please help." It puts our vets in the position they don't really know how to help us. Unless we choose to euthanize because that's the automatic fix. We can stop all this pain, this discomfort of you watching your pet decline, and the uncertainty and the ‘not knowing’ of what to do for your pet. 

We can take care of that because that's what the vet world knows how to do.

Gail Pope: Exactly. You just brought the word "suffering" back into the conversation.

Karen Wylie: There we go.

Gail Pope: And how people see that word or understand that word as different things at different times. It's so overused and in my experience very often it's the caregiver who is suffering more than the animal. The animal's adjusting, winding down. Everything's a gradual pace and process  and it's okay. But the caregiver is suffering and of course they are suffering emotionally. They're having a difficult time. As well as the veterinarian who may still fall into that category as well. It is difficult and it is interpreted as suffering, which I guess it is, but in a different way than we perhaps understand it.

Karen Wylie: Then the vet is responding to the suffering that the pet owner is experiencing. Not necessarily what the experience the pet is having, because as you said, they generally aren't suffering. They are adapting to whatever changes are taking place within their body of how much activity they can do each day or maybe a 15 minute walk is too much so you ease it back to 10 or back to 5. Your animal is adapting and is resilient in those ways. They do live in the moment. So they're adapting to what is in the moment. But as pet owners we're thinking about how they used to be, how we want them to be.

Gail Pope: And what they might be.

Karen Wylie: What they might be, what we know we don't want. Our mind and emotions are just going all over and it's very understandable but it's also always difficult. I was saying earlier, if you have been down this road with pets that are physically declining you begin to look at it a little differently and you accept that decline. There's a pace of decline that you've seen before.

Let's say with kidney disease with older cats. That's a common thing. So you get a little more comfortable in accepting it - but it never gets better. It's not like it's ever okay for you, but you don't have the same angst about it.

I don't know if I've used this term before in our podcast conversations, but I often would refer to my elderly babies with kidney disease as my ‘walking skeletons’ because that's how they looked. They would be getting very bony. But they would be eating every meal, they'd be drinking. I'd be giving them a smaller amount of SubQ fluids depending on their body weight. I'd watch them playing with fake little mice in the hallway, and accepting being groomed by their family members. They were still enjoying life. Yet, they might just die in their sleep that night - but hours earlier, they were living LIFE.

So I guess I had those experiences to contrast that just because they are physically declining, doesn't mean that they're not still enjoying their life.  Because they accept what their life is and adapt to it. They're much better at that than any of us are. I think. 

Why do you think pet parents confuse decline with suffering?

Gail Pope: It's almost the same answer as we just went through because I think it's all about their heart. And because suffering is a current word, I doubt a day goes by in your life that you don't hear somebody talk about all that "Poor thing is suffering." Suffering goes into so many different areas and it's become a standard word that people don't understand at all levels because it's a daily level. But at a deeper level we are not really understanding it.

Karen Wylie: And it is always something to try to fix and stop.

Gail Pope: Yes.

Karen Wylie: And when we go down that road, it must be bad.

Gail Pope: It's so different. Again, all I can do is come back to the fact that it's generally the person mentioning the suffering that they're seeing and not realizing how painful it is for them. They're the ones that are suffering. Whereas, as you said before, I think it was absolutely perfect that our animals are living in the moment. They're practicing acceptance and they're adapting.

As their body changes, they change with it. It's okay because this is where I am right now. I don't think they're looking back or looking forward. Sometimes, obviously animals do have a memory they remember, but it's not about life and how I feel today. It's a different kind of memory. It's where my ball landed yesterday. I'll go and look.

Karen Wylie: Yes, that they remember. They know how to track those down for sure! What have you seen happen with pet parents when people panic at the first signs of decline? Is there anything in particular? Is it weight loss?

I know that's something that whenever I've been checking in with my vet over a period of months or years with a senior pet, certainly weight is something that is correlated with health.

Gail Pope: I think we are reaching a point of looking at decline as a slow process rather than a sudden new symptom that needs to be addressed. So there's the journey through the senior years of life, generally slow and progressive. Sometimes it'll hiccup down a little and then it'll right itself, and then it will hiccup down again.

That leads me back to education. The more we know and the more we understand about life's last chapter is the important part, because once we actually can know and accept that trajectory, it's still not easy. We don't want to see our loved ones decline . It's just very hard to just, again, come back to the word “acceptance”— just accept the fact that it's real, it's normal. If there's something standing out as a real problem, then let's talk about that. 

I think for my part the subject that comes up most, but this is closer towards the end of life, is when the appetite fails. It begins with a, "Oh, he didn't want dinner last night but he ate really well this morning. Now he's missed two days without food. Oh gosh, now he's eating again."

Sometimes it can hiccup up along and that can kill you.

Karen Wylie: But of course, now I just have to give our “Living Quality of Life Care Record Keeping” a plug here. That's where actually keeping records - just taking 90 seconds a day to make some notes about what happened that day - allows you to see patterns and allows you to separate out what's a one-off thing and when you need to change things, whether you need to talk with your vet. Just being very clear about what is happening for your pet and keeping those records can really help you tremendously.

Gail Pope: Leading on from that, the most important thing that one can do is to start learning more about the process of dying because generally, some people, some animals, just suddenly die. However, there is a process that Mother Nature has devised that sits in all our bodies. There's a process for living and then there's a process taking life and living through the senior years and gradually starting to slow down and relax. And then we reach a time for the last period where the body is winding down.

It's in that dying process that there is a trajectory that is normal. So I think the more that we as pet parents can learn about what is normal at the end of life. I'm not saying it's going to happen today or tomorrow but if you know it's there in the future, it takes away some of that "I wonder if this? Oh my God, what if that happens?"

Learn about it. If that happens, we may be approaching the end of life at a closer pace now. Or it may be a little acute thing that we can help with. The more you know, the more you can calm yourself down and take the right step.

Karen Wylie: Absolutely, because I think one of the things that goes hand in hand with watching the physical decline is all that uncertainty. All that not knowing how to care for them, how to change what you do. Then all the worrying about "What is tomorrow going to be like, next week, next month?" All that ‘not knowing’ can really eat you up.

Gail Pope: That brings you back to the moment, doesn't it? To really look at this journey that you're taking and understand that this moment that we are living in is the most precious thing. So if we can try to be like our animals much more, and live in that moment with them, love them today. We don't know what tomorrow will bring.

So while we are sitting here worrying about it and crying, let's sit and talk to them about it. Let's share and care and if I'm going to cry, let's cry together.

Karen Wylie: That's beautiful because we just need to remember: we can make every moment count and we should.

Along the way, there are resources to help at the BrightPathForPets.com website. We'll be sure to include the link to both the "Living Quality of Life Care Assessment" and the "Peaceful Quality of Dying Assessment" because, once again, information can reduce some of that uncertainty.

It is not going to take away the pain of the loss, but it will help you know that you're doing the very best you can. And you're doing it with love - as somebody I know has said just a few times.

Gail Pope: Baby steps!

Karen Wylie: Baby steps, there we go. Alright, with that we'll say thank you for being with us and hope you'll be with us again next week.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Gail Pope: Goodbye.