Peace of Mind for Pet Parents Episode 068: The First Few Days After a Difficult Diagnosis: How to Find Your Footing, Support Your Pet, and Take Care of Yourself

RESOURCES MENTIONED & RELATED READING

• Nourishing Through Illness eBook ($7.99) — Supporting Appetite, Comfort, and Care for Pets with Life-Changing Diagnoses
• LIVING Quality of Life Care Assessment Tool — Free download
• BrightHaven Animals YouTube Channel — Search: BrightHaven Animals | @brighthaven_animals
  • Breakfast at BrightHaven: https://youtu.be/V8erOv6B2Oc?si=bgd5wYsDTbh2G7zk

Related reading:

• Life-Changing Diagnoses in Pets: A Comprehensive Guide
• Emotional Support for Pet Owners Facing a Difficult Diagnosis: Coping with Guilt, Fear, and Grief
• Monitoring Your Pet's Health at Home: A Palliative Care Guide for Chronic and Difficult Conditions

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GET THE EBOOK

"Nourishing Through Illness: Supporting Appetite, Comfort, and Care for Pets with Life-Changing Diagnoses" is the resource Karen introduces in this episode — and it's available now.

This compassionate guide reminds caregivers that feeding is about more than nutrition alone — it is also about love, companionship, dignity, and adapting to a pet’s changing needs with kindness and care. Ideal for caregivers of aging, chronically ill, seriously ill, or terminally ill dogs, cats, and other small companion animals.

https://brightpathforpets.com/nourishing-through-illness

Your purchase supports BrightHaven's 501(c)(3) educational mission.

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Episode Transcript: 

Karen Wylie: Hello and welcome to Peace of Mind for Pet Parents. I'm Karen Wylie here as always with Gail Pope. 

Today we're going to be talking about one of the most difficult moments that any of us can face and that is when we get a life-changing or terminal diagnosis on one of our pets. Whether it's related to cancer, kidney disease, heart disease, cognitive decline, dementia or any other serious condition. 

Many caregivers leave their veterinary appointment feeling quite overwhelmed and frightened and unsure of what to do next. So in this episode, we're going to have a conversation that focuses not on any particular disease because that's not our focus, but instead we're going to talk about the experience that a caregiver has during those first few days after a diagnosis.

What emotions are you feeling? What would you focus on? And what information do you need at that point? What should you avoid doing perhaps? And how can you support your pet while also taking care of yourself? 

So if you have recently received difficult news about your pet, we hope this conversation will help you find your footing, and take the next steps that you need to take with greater confidence and hopefully more peace of mind.

So Gail, starting us off, what do you think is happening emotionally for most pet parents in those first few hours after they receive a difficult diagnosis?

Gail Pope: Well, I think the first thing that occurs to me is that the word "Difficult" is very broad. There can be a difficult diagnosis, say, in the early stage of kidney failure. Then there can be a difficult diagnosis all the way to the possibility of a difficult surgery but with a terminal ending, it can be so much more severe than "Here's a diagnosis and we can do some work within that diagnosis."

However, I think any diagnosis that is a change in general everyday life is something that always stops you in your tracks. I guess I've done it so very often that I'm used to that moment when your heart skips a beat and the sense of panic wells up inside momentarily, and it's "Oh" but I guess because I've experienced it so much, I can then relax, let go, and think, "Okay, what do I need to do? What have I been doing? What has he been eating? What does this mean? Do I need to change his diet? Do I need to add more supplements or stop something in particular? What is the best way forward? What do I need to..."

I guess it's making a plan, isn't it? But probably the very first thing really is getting a grip on yourself. Actually letting go and coming back to Earth before you start to panic and start searching Google and just following the river of panic.

Karen Wylie: What you and I had started talking about before I hit the record button was that neither of us have been told our pets have a terminal diagnosis or a difficult diagnosis. Especially in your case, you were saying you would be given the blood work, you'd be given test results but it would be up to you to figure out what all that meant. Quite possibly because of your sanctuary experience, people expected that you had a higher level of understanding and "You would figure it out."

Gail Pope: Yes! I think, just stopping you there for a moment, you're absolutely right, because we weren't consulting directly as one would normally with a veterinarian. We actually had our own account with the laboratories. So when we saw a change in behavior or something that said, "Perhaps we should just check on blood work.” - we would draw the blood ourselves, so we would be the first people to see that blood work. 

So I didn't receive a diagnosis particularly because I received the blood work. It was after, when I would schedule an appointment with our veterinarian to talk about next steps.

Karen Wylie: Got it. So you'd already be putting the pieces of the puzzle together. So you were then prepared to ask a lot of questions most likely.

Gail Pope: Yes and no. Again, remembering that I was working with homeopathic veterinarians and the emphasis is body, mind, and spirit. I would've sent them the blood work. So yes, we would spend a little time, again, not focusing on the length of life. Focusing on what the blood work told us is going on in that body. Now let's take everything together, put it in one piece, and let's think what is the best way forward here.

So I probably experienced the difficult diagnosis, if you like, in my mind because I read the blood work. I didn't have someone telling me what it was, but I could see the red lines against where it's in the black and the values that were like, "Ooh, oh my God." So yes, there was that, "Oh my goodness, what are we going to do? Oh, I have no idea."

And sometimes it just qualified what we thought was probably going on, especially in renal failure. As it goes through the stages, you check on it and you expect to see it a little bit worse. It doesn't bring that awful sinking of your stomach. So anyway, I interrupted you, so carry on.

Karen Wylie: No. What you're describing, though, is a partnership with your vet. Where in your case, you were getting access to test results before your vet, but then you would share the information with your vet. Then you would get together and have a phone call and have a chat about what to do, what to change if anything, and so forth.

That's certainly, I think, what everyone should work toward. The average pet parent working with a conventional vet is not the one receiving the test results and alerting their vet. In a conventional situation, the pet parents are being told what a diagnosis is or sometimes just the results of the tests. As we were saying earlier, we were not being told anything was terminal or even that something was difficult. Just,’here's what's going on’.

I've shared at other times that one of my ways of coping on getting surprising news is to just say, "I just found out what Greta's likely to die from, sometime." I push it off. I accept it but I'm not accepting it as changing today. It's not going to change what I do with my pet today in terms of how I feel about it because they're not dying today.

Gail Pope: Exactly. Again, it's the animal lessons: "Living in the moment." Let's make today as good as it can be and we'll go forward with baby steps to follow the path. It's where that old saying comes in again, that people are familiar with me saying, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going."

So depending on the severity of these results or diagnosis, it's up to us as the caregiver to step in and talk to the people that we need to acquire help from. But the very first thing is for us to take care of ourselves and our emotional response because if we're working from a place of panic, we're not going to find the right balance for healing for our animal. So I think it really rests on our shoulders first, or maybe on our heart. Not our shoulders. Yes. It's more down here, isn't it?

Karen Wylie: Yes, it's our heart that just starts to break right away because we focus on we're going to lose them. They're not going to be with us and it's very difficult to get past that shock, the disbelief, the fear of what to do, how to do whatever might be possible. I think sometimes when we are given information even if we're listening to everything that the vet is saying, if we're listening to it through our emotions, we're not likely to hear everything that's being told to us.

Being able to sit with that later and begin jotting down your questions that you would have. Sometimes, you go to pay at the front desk and your receipt or your invoice lists the services and the tests that were provided and the cost. But nowhere on there is the spelling of the diagnosis that your animal's been given and sometimes that's a question. Exactly what is the diagnosis? What I want to learn about it. I'm going to go to Dr. Google and I'm going to search the heck out of this.

Gail Pope: You've just underscored one of the most important things to me. You should never go to a veterinary appointment of any kind, whether it be on Zoom, whether it be on the telephone, whether it be in the office, unless you have pad and pen in hand so you can actually focus on what you're hearing, jotting down notes, putting a question mark where it’s needed, like in the margin or "I'd need to know more about that."

Or you could stop the person every now and again and say, "Can I just ask you a quick question? I didn't quite understand what you said," or, "I didn't hear what you said." Because you're taking in probably quite a lot of information, and you're going to need to read through your notes afterwards. If you've just scribbled quickly, you won't actually be able to figure out what it is. I know I've been there. Then, you end up having to call or you go to Dr. Google to try and decipher all the notes that you've got.

Karen Wylie: I wish more clinics had a listing in their services for a follow-up conversation, even if it was just a five or 10-minute phone call. Because you're likely to have more questions in the next day or two or three, as you're trying to figure out what it actually means for you and your pet. But generally, if you call the clinic and say you have some questions from what the doctor told you a couple of days ago and you'd really like a call back or an appointment to talk about it, it can usually be scheduled. They'll figure out a way to get you that information.

But I think part of it is you don't have to solve everything the day you get the information. They're sending you home with your pet and they've just told you what they believe is going on, and here's the test results. It means you're going home with your pet and they're going to be with you tomorrow. You can continue thinking about it and having questions.

Now, there's a lot of words that are thrown around: diagnosis, prognosis, and prediction. And they're not the same things. They're very different. What the diagnosis means is one thing. What the pet's prognosis might be is something different. And then of course one of the questions, either in your mind or that you might speak aloud is "How much time do we have?"

Gail Pope: Well, I can start with that last one. For so many years, that would never, ever come out of my mouth because whenever I've encountered a really serious diagnosis and my brain has said, "Oh my goodness, she's only got weeks or months," or we work it out for ourselves and panic rises. But many of those animals have lived on for years.

I think so many animals have taught me that lesson - to not think into the future. Again, let's live for today. Let's do the best we can. Let's make plans for how we're going to reorganize our lifestyle in some way that may be necessary. Again, every situation is different. The animal may be slowly becoming incapacitated. You may be thinking about whether you may need to consider mobility and start working with litter boxes, starting working with steps to the bed or all of these kinds of things.

So taking it, again, in baby steps. Finding the steps. It really is settling down to the part of the journey that you're in but keeping an eye to the future but not to the end of it. There's no point. Let's work for today and what's right ahead of us rather than when he or she may actually be dying. That's not for us to judge, and it spoils our lives and their lives if we judge that in those early days. I just don't know.

Karen Wylie: And our vets don't know either. It's an unfair question if we do ask that because they might try to tell us and give us their best guess. But they're all estimates. Every pet is so unique and the environment they live in is different. A prognosis is not a calendar. We are catastrophizing, as we tend to do, from that place of shock and fear, then we're already rushing to the end and crying about it.

It's really hard to avoid that, especially if a diagnosis is a shock. I think I've shared this before because I've used Mr. Hope, a cat that wandered into our yard 20 years ago. But he was with us for 16 and a half years, and when he was 14 years old, he was just there for his annual exam and our vet said, "His teeth still look great."

He never had a dental. She said, "But you know what? I'd rather go ahead and do a dental on him now at age 14 rather than what might be needed in a few years. So why don't we do the full panel blood work, make sure everything's clear, and then we'll do the teeth cleaning?" Then the blood work came back and had that Cardio Pet Score which indicates something picked up about the heart. That was the tip of the iceberg that there was something going on with his heart.

We did the ultrasound and it was Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy. I think it can be really common, you're not even necessarily aware that something is brewing inside these little bodies. You're just going about daily life and doing what you understand to be the right moves, like an annual exam and then surprise!

Gail Pope: You're entering back into the human world again now because again there’s a parallel. We have to also remember that we are all different, and we all "greet" illness in different ways. Some of us deny it in our own selves. We experience symptoms of this, that, or the other and we just ignore them. Unless they get too difficult and then we do end up going to the doctor's.

Other people go to the doctor's for routine checkups a lot and sometimes that's when they'll find something that they weren't even aware of. Yet you have the other person living that same parallel path who didn't know that there was anything there, and still doesn't know and is living his best life without knowing that the time for that life is ebbing. He doesn't know, so he's having a great time. Whereas the other person is living in the fear and the worry and the anguish that can come along with a diagnosis. It's an interesting thing. Again, I always talk about it.

I'm rereading a book at the moment about human hospice by Atul Gawande and this is a subject that he talks about an awful lot as to how giving a diagnosis is approached. And how doctors and veterinarians, it's the same thing, how they can help their patients by not going too far down that road, not going too far down that road, not giving false hope. But again, he comes back to the world of hospice all the time because that's his specialty.

It's true that we do that. We overthink. We go too far, whatever our role in life is, and we end up starting at the end and working backwards instead of tippy-toeing forwards.

Karen Wylie: Yes, taking it one step at a time as you generally encourage us all to do, which is so on target because that catastrophizing and immediately going to the end is when we're on Dr. Google at 2:00 AM in the morning. We're doing all the research on our pet's disease or diagnosis, thinking we're going to come up with the way to fix everything.

Gail Pope: The world of animal communication is expanding more and more. But it is so valuable because it teaches us a lot more about our animals and they are still desperately, I think, trying to teach us to live with them and in the future treat them as our children. That's lovely in many respects.

The same thing with our children but I don't know that we have the same paranoia about health with our children as we do with our animals. Maybe it's because we know they're possibly, hopefully, going to have a long lifespan and outlive us. But with our animals, we know that their lifespan isn't so long. So it's like being the mother hen, we watch them with hawk eyes because we don't know when they're going to leave us.

Karen Wylie: And of course with children you get them to maybe age three, and they can actually tell you how they feel.

Gail Pope: That's true.

Karen Wylie: At least, give you a clue. And with our pets, they give other clues if we're looking for them. That's perhaps another conversation. But where you're going with this, I think, is that our pets don't know that there's a diagnosis in play. They're not aware of their test results.

Gail, what do you think our pets would want us to focus on during those first few days after a pet parent has received scary information?

Gail Pope: I think it would be all about — it's trite to say forget the fear, forget the worry, just be with them. But when you open that up, that's what they would want. You can think about anything that comes along in our lives that fills us with fear or panic, and we race down that road. Sometimes we'll stop and I know I tend to sometimes, something really worries me and I push it away saying, "Okay, I'm not going to do this, and I'm not going to think about it."

It's hard to do. But I think, when you have your animal sitting there staring at you with loving eyes, to be able to stop in that moment and think, "Oh, my goodness he's looking at me as though I'm some kind of idiot." I'm sitting with all these worried thoughts going round and round. I'm looking at the computer, I'm jotting down notes, I'm making plans. And all he wants is to sit on my lap and give me a cuddle and say, 'It's okay, I'm fine. Let's go have dinner.'"

Whatever it is, they want us to join them in their moment, rather than them join us in our moment because ours is not the best.

Karen Wylie: Ours is definitely not the best and our pet is still here. That's the thing. If you're sent home with your pet, your pet is still here. Your pet is still enjoying its life, living in the moment. They're so much better at that than we are.

Gail Pope: They are. But that's our biggest lesson, isn't it, in all of it?

Karen Wylie: It always is.

Gail Pope: To learn, to let go but in a special way, in this conversation, letting go of initial panic, initial worry. Those initial feelings that come bubbling up, I'm not saying dismiss them, but let them go for now. In this minute, this moment in time, how urgent is it to panic? It's hard to do.

Karen Wylie: It's really hard to do.

Gail Pope: But if you can focus on, "I need to prepare his dinner. I need to... Oh, my goodness, I haven't groomed him today." If you can divert yourself or even meditate and have him sitting on your lap. Just taking yourself out of that initial stage of worry and fear, and involving them with you in love. That really helps.

Karen Wylie: It really does help. As you were saying, begin paying attention to some other things rather than all the deep dives on your computer at 2:00 a.m. and so forth. There are some things you can pay attention to. You can start looking at their appetite and what's normal right now for them.

How are they doing? How much are they drinking? How mobile are they? What's the status quo right now? That becomes a baseline for you to just understand where they're at right now and begin paying more attention to it than you did prior to getting lab results.

Gail Pope: Comes back down again to body, mind, and spirit. That's where the puzzle fits. You can have three columns.

Karen Wylie: True, very true. So many times thinking of just myself over the years, you feel so alone when you're given information and you're trying to figure out what it means and what to do for your pet and for yourself. So what's your thinking about what caregivers should consider having on their team really to provide some support for them as they move forward?

Gail Pope: That takes me back into my world of BrightHaven because my team would be volunteers, maybe one of our staff, and we only had a little staff but we were very close. But I would find myself sitting on the couch with a few cats around me, and they would help me feel better. It may not even be the cat that I was worrying about or the dog that I was worrying about, or even the chicken maybe. But just taking loving kindness from another being.

I think we draw ourselves inwards when we're fearful and worried. We don't share our anxiety sometimes. We try to bury it but it's still going round and round. But our animals know that, they sense it. So I think they will come to you when they sense they know you need help. They may not know the details but they know you need help.

They may not even realize that you're worrying about them. I don't know. I imagine sometimes they do. But they generally will know and want to come and be with you. We've all had a dog sitting in front of us, staring into our eyes with such love. It's like, "I need to help you and I don't know how. How can I help you? Would you like to take me for a walk?" Whatever it is. But they want to help us, so I think that's probably my best answer to that part.

Karen Wylie: I think that's lovely because you're talking about at least having a focus for the next 10 minutes or 15 minutes on the love that is still there with another pet. It's a distraction, and it's in the moment for you. But it could also be the pet you've just gotten the test results on who's ready for a walk. You just don't know, but that is supportive.

I think one of the things, I've usually been the one taking our animals to the vet and then coming home and telling Tim about it. So part of that little phrasing that I started doing for myself was really so that I knew what to say and how to say it and share news with Tim. Tim being my husband for anyone who's listening for the first time. And back to Mister Hope, Mister Hope was his kitty. He was mine, he was Chey and Livvy's but he was really Tim's kitty.

So when we got that Hypertrophic Cardio diagnosis and I was coming home, I'm driving home and I'm saying, "Okay, here's how I'm going to share with Tim," because he needs to know and then we can problem solve and think about it together. Then Tim becomes a support to me and me for him. That's when I would say, "Yes, I think we found out today what we're likely to lose him from ultimately. But he's not on anything today. It's just a test result. No medication today. Nothing for us to do differently but it is something for us to know about."

Being able to have your family part of your support team, I think how you learn to communicate with the other members of your family to be part of that support team matters greatly.

Gail Pope: Yes and some people don't have family but we all have someone, a next door neighbor, somebody who comes in to share a cup of tea with us sometimes. Just to share so that somebody else can just be a shoulder to cry on if you need.

Karen Wylie: It is more difficult if we have to walk this path alone. Especially because, as we were saying, we're already anticipating the end. Even if we're able to take our mind off of it, we already thought of it, and so the anticipatory grief has begun. It's part of our experience from that point on. Why do you think grief happens so quickly, long before the pet actually leaves us and dies?

Gail Pope: Grief is inherent in life though, isn't it? We're talking about grief surrounding death but we're grieving every single day. We're loving, we're living, we're doing, we're being, we're grieving. We're grieving the loss of a broken ornament, a glass that shattered that was precious. Something like that. We grieve various little things all the time.

So I think acceptance is a word that comes to mind to a degree. As we grow up, we grow older, we grow a little wiser. But maybe that's the lesson that we don't learn enough - that we have to learn to accept some things, know that we can't change everything. It's not about us. It's not our journey. It's part of our journey.

With the diagnosis that we're talking about, that's a word that comes in quite strongly again now. You have to accept it first. We tend to fight it. "No, that can't be right. His heart can't be failing." Well, let's step back a bit here and let's accept what we know. Once we accept it, maybe we can move forward at a slower pace.

Karen Wylie: And those little losses along the way that do allow us to grieve a little bit along the way, I think that ends up being very helpful to us. We don't know how long we'll have them, whether it's, a few months, years. You and I have both had many pets along the way that way outlived anyone's expectation of how long they'd be with us. But it is learning to love with everything so uncertain, just not knowing the end of the book, not knowing the end of the story.

Gail Pope: Facing our own uncertainty is something that's very important there. We don't know, any one of us could be hit by a car and killed tomorrow. We could have a sudden heart attack and die. So again, it brings us back to living in the moment, enjoying what we've got while we've got it, and focusing on that.

Karen Wylie: Yes, while our pet is still here and is still with us. Where there's still time to love them and connect with them, and have a lot of more meaningful moments together with them.

Gail Pope: Again, you just used another word there, "Meaningful". That can go hand-in-hand with grief because when you accept that time may not be as long as you'd hoped for, then the meaningful moments become precious, and they help you to accept.

Because in your heart, you know very well that we don't know how long or short the time is, but we know it may be shorter than we'd hoped for — whether it is for us or for the animal. So making meaningful moments in that time that we've got means that we are concentrating on what we can do to make memories without actually thinking, but understanding that's part of our grieving process. That is anticipatory grief.

Karen Wylie: The diagnosis may change the future, but it does not immediately change today. And our pet is still there with us, so take a breath.

Gail Pope: And have a cuppa!

Karen Wylie: Focus on the next step. There you go. There you go. That's the best thing to do all the time, as always. That's a great way for us to end. Remember you do not need to navigate this journey alone. There are a lot of resources available ready to support you, including us. So please reach out if we can help. And with that, I guess we'll say thank you for being with us. Bye-bye for now.

Gail Pope: Goodbye for now.