Peace of Mind for Pet Parents Episode 082: More Than Medicine: Staying Your Pet’s Person

RESOURCES MENTIONED & RELATED LISTENING

• LIVING Quality of Life Care Assessment Tool — Free download
• Menu for Healing PDF - Free download
• PEACEFUL PDF - Free Download
• BrightHaven Animals YouTube Channel — Search: BrightHaven Animals | @brighthaven_animals
• Animal Hospice Group (animalhospicegroup.com) — professional certification organization in animal hospice and palliative care

You might also find helpful:

• Episode 074: Are You Really Seeing Your Pet Clearly?(opens in new tab)(opens in new tab)
• Episode 050: The Weight of Caregiving: When Love Meets Uncertainty(opens in new tab)(opens in new tab)
• Episode 073: Reading What They Can’t Say: Pain, Comfort, and the End-of-Life Journal
• Episode 045: New Year, Same Love: Why Your Love Is Enough When Caring for an Aging or Ill Pet(opens in new tab)
• Episode 069: Preparing for Your Pet's Death — Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Ways to Make Every Moment Count
  
• Episode 058: Can My Pet Die Peacefully at Home? What Natural Death Really Looks Like

Related reading:

• Caring for Your Sick Pet Alone: Practical Tips for Solo Pet Caregivers
• Knowing When to Stop: A Pet Parent’s Guide to Letting Go of Treatment, Not Love
• Monitoring Your Pet's Health at Home: A Palliative Care Guide for Chronic and Difficult Conditions
• Emotional Support for Pet Owners Facing a Difficult Diagnosis: Coping with Guilt, Fear, and Grief
• The Other Doctor in the Room: Trusting Nature at the End of Life
• Walking the BrightPath: A Pet Parent’s Guide to Home Hospice and Natural Transition(opens in new tab)

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Episode Transcript: 

Karen Wylie: Hello and welcome back to Peace of Mind for Pet Parents. I'm Karen Wylie. Here as always with my wonderful friend Gail Pope, founder and president of BrightHaven. Today we're going to begin a conversation that we think a lot of you are living through right now, and even if you never had words for it, here's what we're going to talk about.

When a pet gets a chronic or difficult diagnosis, something starts to shift in our caregiver day. It can be really incremental and quietly creep up on us but suddenly you can begin to feel like almost every interaction that you have with your pet has some kind of a task attached to it. 

It's time to take this pill, time to eat this food. I got to clean you up. Let me check that lump on the side. Is it increasing, or what's happening? Sometimes you're helping them stand up. You're putting drops in their eyes. You've got so many things you might be doing to them - and for them - but at one point along the way, you probably stop and begin to think, "When did I stop being Mom or Dad and just begin being that person who does things to her, who does things to him?"

So care tasks are supposed to support the relationship - but they're not supposed to become the relationship. Tasks are something we do, actions we take motivated by our love of course. But when illness comes into the equation, when it moves into our relationship, it becomes really easy for the taskmaster in each of us, the caregiver, to take over.

So today we're going to talk about how that shift can happen, why it happens to even the most devoted caregivers among us and most importantly, how you can stay your pet's person even while you're doing everything that a nurse would do for your pet. 

So Gail, to start us off, in your years at BrightHaven managing so many animals, I assume you had this feeling yourself at times where you were realizing that you were more caregiver than companion to animals that you loved. Would that be a fair statement or question?

Gail Pope: I don't know. You blindsided me with this one.

Karen Wylie: You always say that.

Gail Pope: Usually I have something that's fairly intelligent that I can come back with but with this - I'm dreaming. I'm going back in time to the sanctuary and a busy day, and it would be filled with giving sub-Q fluids, giving medications, scooping litter boxes, doing bits of housekeeping, laundry, sitting down and cuddling a cat here or there, taking a dog for a walk or doing nail trims, all sorts of different things through the day. I hadn't really looked at it as doing certain things at certain times but we did.

Because I'm thinking of a time when Blanca would be spending her morning, part of her morning, following our treatment sheet and doing those tasks. There'd be various things she'd say, "Oh, Gail, can you help me with..." or, "Could you do this?" or, "What about that?" And Susanna, again, on other days would be doing the medical stuff. But I think, I don't know, I'm trying to segment it out.

Karen Wylie: It is interesting to think about, isn't it? I've seen different photographs of you with your trolley where you're bringing the food around and going to a room where different animals are and feeding them with all of them looking very interested at what you're bringing them.

Gail Pope: Yes, following the cart.

Karen Wylie: I know you had routines that you followed.

Gail Pope: Yes, we did. However, those routines would pretty much extend through the day. Maybe the afternoons were quieter. They were more of a time for a little more peace perhaps in the sanctuary and a little bit more work at a desk perhaps for me and Susanna.

It varied a lot but I think part of it is going back to the atmosphere. Soft music, a happy atmosphere, laughing and joking between people, stopping to give an animal medication of some sort, and actually sitting down with them wherever they were, or even if they were sitting in a cat tree, there would be conversation. There would be, "So how are you doing? Hey, gorgeous." The little bit of a snuggly cuddle and just bringing that energy to everybody.

Karen Wylie: Yes.

Gail Pope: And I think as our population declined over time before the sanctuary finally closed and we didn't have a lot of animals, it was still pretty much the same. I was working on my own and doing all of the tasks. But again, we never had closed doors unless we had generally a calico that did not like anybody else, and she preferred to be behind a closed door. Her name was Sassie.

Karen Wylie: There you go. Appropriate for a calico cat.

Gail Pope: Yes, very. She came to us with that name, so yes, obviously now I'm thinking, "Yes, I guess I know why her previous owner may have rejected her." The sassiness of a calico can be quite scary. But again, it was greeting, it was being with animals and meeting them where they are. Yes, we may have to give you a pill, or we may give fluids.

For the most part, when they would see it's time for the fluid pole and the "Oh, no, now we know what's happening." They never ran away because we made it a time of love and doing it together rather than, "Oh, okay, you're going to stand up on this table and we're going to do it." We would go to their bed or wherever they were and have a little chat, maybe give them a treat. Generally, that came afterwards if necessary but I didn't really take treats with me. It was more about the loving treat and then doing the job. And while the fluids were flowing, it would be more of a - I am doing a medical thing but now the fluid's flowing. It's you and me in conversation. "Hey, and how are you feeling?" And, "It's okay. I know it's not going to..." And it was a partnership rather than I'm doing to you. I think that's what it is now. I still have medical chores to do.

Karen Wylie: Yes.

Gail Pope: But it really is a bright, happy atmosphere in the house. It's laughing and joking, taking time to just stop and sit down and have a little cuddle or pick up a grooming brush and go around and I'm going to sit down here for a few minutes. So you're actually doing a job, "Oh, and I happen to have nail trimmers here. Ooh, look at that long nail."

Karen Wylie: We can take care of that.

Gail Pope: If you can build a loving relationship, there's your start. Then you start adding other little pieces in as they're needed, then it becomes something that flows rather than, "It's time for medicine." I think you can get into an, "Okay, I've got to give this pill now and that medicine then," and you're focused on just doing that, rather than making time to be together.

Karen Wylie: Yes, that's a good point because I think depending on the condition and the diagnosis that you're trying to address with your pet, your task list can take over. You're thinking so much about what to do and how to do it, and sometimes dread doing it. The 100th time I did sub-Q fluids was a lot easier than the first time where you worry the whole time about putting the needle in just right and getting the fluids to start. And where you're second-guessing yourself all the way through. It's stressful for you and you can bring that stress to your pet.

Gail Pope: Of course.

Karen Wylie: So that, that becomes part of it. Do you think the sheer number of small tasks that a caregiver takes on, the medications, the monitoring, the helping with mobility, the monitoring or changing and adjusting the feeding, the food and the feeding all the time, what does that add up to over the course of a single day?

Gail Pope: It adds up to being a mother. It really does. If you think about it, if you put it as a parallel with a human child, you have all those things. You have a baby who becomes a toddler who gradually is getting older, and your daily lifestyle changes with it all the time. Sometimes you may be a full-time mom and you may have a child that isn't necessarily as healthy as you'd love them to be. But there are always challenges, medical or physical with bringing up children.

Same thing with animals. And you adapt. You bring those into your life. You have a basic schedule, especially if you have to go to work for certain hours each day or some days. So you adapt life to fit a schedule. So I think it really is just bringing love into the relationship and it being because a relationship needs to be nurtured. It's not all about doing, it's about being together as well.

Karen Wylie: It's what it's all about. It's why we go through everything that we go through with them.

Gail Pope: That's right.

Karen Wylie: To keep them with us as long as possible, for them to enjoy their life as long as possible.

Gail Pope: Yes. That's right.

Karen Wylie: And you really never want to see your animal flinching when they see you walking toward them. That just stakes through our hearts. If and when that happens it could mean that you're getting close to caregiver burnout because if that happens it may be happening frequently and not just a one-time thing.

And then your relationship is being affected. So monitoring is something that really is important. I think part of it has to do with when you have a larger number of animals to manage,  which I know you had a lot more to manage in the sanctuary than I did. But I still had more than 10. So when you're looking around in the morning, I was always wanting to get my hands on everybody. Even if it was just 30 seconds, I wanted to look them in the eye, get a sense of how they were feeling that day. And check hydration in their neck, as I would be petting them.

And watching them walk around, it's like even if they could be a kitten, they could be one year old, they could be six years old or 16, I would still be wanting to get my hands on them every morning. I guess that was just my way of assuring myself that everybody's okay and I can go upstairs and go to work, or I could get ready to go out of town if that day or that week that's what I needed to do.

Gail Pope: Again, though, I think just as you've described it, that's all part of being a mother and it comes naturally to most of us, I think. That's reminding me how we learned, and I can't remember when we very first started, but I know darn why. When you've got one or 10 or 100 animals and they've been prescribed a particular medication or a supplement. You buy whatever it is, and you go to give it, whether it's a pill that goes down the throat or something that needs mixing, and they go, "Not doing it. Hate it."

You try in every which way to put it in a special tasty thing, but now, "Oh, God, now I've got this and this, that he needs to take too", and so it becomes a bigger problem. That's what started happening with us a way, way back. And I discovered a product called Colostrum from New Zealand that somebody had recommended. At that time, I also discovered that for some unknown reason our cats and— dogs were easy, they loved it anyway— but all the cats were like, "Ooh! Wow, what is this? "

Just mix it with a little water and make it into a little paste. So then gradually what we did, we would have as many little jars or saucers as we needed, and we would have a dose of colostrum in each one. Then from our treatment sheet, any medication that animal was on would get mixed in with the colostrum. We would hand deliver them to everyone and we would often find, I think there's a photo somewhere, of three of the little dogs standing around Blanca as she's actually preparing all the saucers for that day. And the dogs are there like, "Yes, this is so exciting." "We're waiting for ours to come."

And we would find all the animals just loved it. On the odd occasion that there was one or two cats that were not particularly excited about just licking it out of a saucer, we'd put it in a syringe and sometimes they'd take it from the syringe quite happily "Oh, I like this." Other times, if we really had to, we would use the syringe to actually syringe it to them and it wouldn't be a horrible flavor. They would actually enjoy it. They just didn't want to do it for whatever reason. But we always found a way to make it work.

Now, we had, again, another story. Hope, our lovely Aussie dog who was basically deaf and blind and she was a little bit brain damaged. She would eat her dinner from her plate but if anything was different, "No." She was very focused on what was right and what was wrong and what she would and what she wouldn't. You couldn't syringe her, that would be an attack on her. Then we discovered that if we put her meds or anything we wanted to give her in a big syringe, like a big 5 or 10 cc syringe, and just offer her the syringe. Let her lick a little bit of the taste of the colostrum, and she'd be like, "Yes."

So it's just getting to know everybody and what's going to work for them. And then when you do that and medicine doesn't become a chore for you, it doesn't become a horrible experience for them, but it becomes something to look forward to then everything changes. The atmosphere in the house stays happy, and the music's playing and everyone's having fun and there's a toy mouse going across the floor with somebody chasing it. It's all part and parcel of the medical experience as well as the living and the relationships that are going on in the house. It all just comes, and you'll find a couple of cats curled up in bed ready for a morning nap, and you can hear them having a conversation. "Oh, look, here she comes." "Wow!"

It's beautiful. It can be very lovely, and I know that I often hear from consultation clients how overwhelmed they feel because of this or that medication or remedy and what's going on with the animal, and they become so almost paralyzed with the fear of the trajectory of what's happening today, what's happening tomorrow, and how can I keep doing this. Then the love doesn't surround everything. They tend to bury themselves, so the animal withdraws a little bit because they feel the distance.

Sometimes it's time to let go, and if you can't give the medicine, then don't give it. I'm not suggesting that we should all do that. Depends on the medicine. But finding a way to do it that suddenly magically gives you a friend rather than a foe.

Karen Wylie: Yes and so often it's just the lack of confidence of being able to do easily what you haven't done before. If you haven't pilled a cat on a regular basis, it is something to learn, and there's lots of different ways to do it with each cat having a preferred way. And you having a better way to do it for yourself.

But I think sometimes when we're learning how to do it to begin with, and then how to do it with this particular animal, we stress ourselves out about it, and our animals do pick up on that.

Gail Pope: Again, they're our children, aren't they? If you think, we generally have one, two, or three, or even more children, we still have those same worries about here's the little boy that says, "No, I'm not swallowing a pill. You can't make me." Just the same as a calico, isn't it, really?

Karen Wylie: Usually, as most things can be attributed to the calicos. Remember, we call them opinionated around here. At this house we've had several of them over the years. They're opinionated. Always have something to say about everything.

I'm hearing you describe the routines, when we call them routines, sometimes I call them routines because that's the task, but if we turn them into rituals that we specially create around that animal to express the love we have for them. It can transform that particular task.

And I talk about Mr. Hope so often on this podcast. I'm going to continue today because when he was first diagnosed with hypertrophic cardio, he was 14 years old. So once I had this diagnosis in play then getting my hands on him every morning was something I had to do. Yet he really loved his favorite window in the house which was about 10 feet up beyond kitchen cabinets, in a window sill that I couldn't get to. So I had to get him down. So that was a puzzle because he was never one who liked canned food, so I didn't necessarily have treats to give him.

But I had been giving him treats in the afternoon because— especially when Livy came as a puppy, I was still training Chey and you do crate training and all sorts of stuff to help them learn your requests or your commands. And I would be giving them treats. Well, Mr. Hope would come from wherever he was to jump on top of Livy’s crate to be part of the treat experience. So obviously he was just supervising them doing what they're supposed to do to get a treat from me. But it would be, "Okay, this one's for Chey, this one's for Livy, and this one's for Mr. Hope." And so Hope became part of the treating in the afternoons.

That then gave me the idea to make his place of daily exam in the morning on top of Livy’s crate. I created this ritual that when I would come into the family room and he would see that I was coming, he would then jump down from his windowsill and run over to the top of Livy’s crate and do a silent meow. He never had a meow you could hear but he would mouth his little meow. It was the cutest thing. Then I would assemble everything needed for the morning for him. Now, I would go over and I would be checking his gum color, because that's something when you have an animal with heart disease, you're checking that.

You're wanting to check their breathing. He also, as an elder kitty had, had some kidney issues, so I was monitoring that, checking hydration. 

The thing I want to mention about the ritual here with Mr. Hope is how important it became. Because one year into his cardio diagnosis, he started being on one pill of  to help reduce formation of blood clots.  And by the time, in the last three months of his life, we were up to five pills or liquids in the morning and three or four of them again at night. 

So over that period of time, if we didn't have this ritual of love where he could come running and know he was going to get five different things, pills and liquids and everything else, but at the end of it, he was also getting a treat.

And then it was time to be on my lap. We would never have been able to do what we did in the final months of his life.

So we started early and made it into a wonderful time to be together. And what it did for me, and I think for some people this might be important, is that although my caregiver's eye would watch him throughout the day, wherever he was, my caregiving, my actual tasks, were in the morning first thing and the last thing before I would go to bed. The rest of the time was just love. And that really worked for me with just about everybody.

So it's something I would always recommend that people think about -  is that something that would work for you? Because then it's over with and it's not your pet anticipating two hours later you're coming with another pill, and two hours later you're coming with yet another, maybe it's a liquid this time in a syringe.

It's over and they get the treat, it's time for love, and the day begins. Anyway, I just wanted to share that because that made a big difference for me and brought the stress level down, too.

Gail Pope: It's all about love, dear. It's all about love, it is.

Karen Wylie: Learning how to create and establish a routine really is a different thing. Sometimes when everybody's feeling well and in good condition at younger ages, we're just focusing on the water and the food bowl. But as things begin to have different diagnoses, different things to monitor over time then establishing these routines or rituals can really help a lot.

So Gail, what are some small and realistic ways that a caregiver can build in moments that are just about connection with no task attached, even on the busiest care days? And from what I've heard you describe about your BrightHaven days, every day was a busy care day.

Gail Pope: Just stopping to sit down every now and again. Impromptu cuddles, those kinds of things. And a time of day, I think in a normal, even abnormal household, if you sit down to have an evening meal and then just perhaps sit and relax for a while, listen to music, watch the television, that's a time— that's a family time.

So making other family times where they get used to you taking a break at lunchtime. It's family time. Just making those special moments. It's what life's all about, isn't it?

Karen Wylie: It sure is. And when you said sitting on the couch that just made me think too. I generally have a place that I administer pills and so forth, and then we're on the couch and the couch is nothing but love.

So for me, I guess I'm drawing lines. For me, that worked. It may not work for other people, but perhaps...

Gail Pope: Yes, it's a what works philosophy. All households are different and all animals are different, and so it really is fitting in with what works on both sides.

Karen Wylie: Exactly. Because each relationship is going to be unique. What worked with one pet may not work with the next one. Being flexible and feeling it out and trying out different ways of pilling and different ways of monitoring will be what it's all about.

Gail Pope: Definitely.

Karen Wylie: All right. Relationship is what hospice care is all about. As we mentioned to you last week, we were going to be beginning enrollment for our "Relationship-Centered Animal Hospice" course and it is open now (https://www.animalhospicegroup.com/relationship-centered-animal-hospice-course-fall-2026) . It's a live eight-week program built around this exact idea that we've been talking about today that caregiving isn't just a set of tasks to manage. It's a journey that we share with our pet as their caregiver and the relationship that we have between the two of us.

It's a small live group, not a self-paced course. We're going to be meeting on Tuesday evenings starting October 13th and it will run through December 1st. It's open to both dedicated pet parents and pet care practitioners. No hospice background required at all. This is an intro level course. So all you need is a willingness to learn alongside others who are walking a similar path. So we hope that is a course that you will give some thought to. We'll include the link in the show notes, and hope you'll join us. We're both looking forward to it.

So I guess, Gail, what we'll say is that wherever you are, whether you're deep in the caregiver task list or you just found a quiet moment to be with your pet, we're glad you spent this time with us. Thank you for listening to Peace of Mind for Pet Parents.

Until next time, take good care of yourself too. Bye bye now.

Gail Pope: Goodbye, and thank you for joining us again.