Canine Senility is Leading to My Own Insanity

My dog is going senile. She’s a semi-large breed (half Great Dane, half Doberman/Shepard mix - yeah, rather large), and she’ll be 13 in May. It might not sound that old, but for a larger breed, it’s ancient. To compare it people-wise, if she were a Chihuahua she’d still be in her 60’s, taking swimming lessons at the senior center and playing bridge every Friday with the girls, going to Bingo every week and having her blue hair done at a regular salon. But she’s a big dog, which means she’s more like the slow-moving terror of the nursing home; the sneaky late-80-something old lady with Alzheimer’s who stinks and is always causing trouble, stealing and messing things up whether she means to or not. She’s the one the beauty students try to pawn off on each other when they visit, because nobody really wants to touch that smelly old thing. But despite the fact that she’s smelly and slow and destructive, she’s still sweet and lovable in a pitiful kind of way.

Now, Alex has pretty much always been stupid. In her defense, however, it’s not entirely her fault. She was actually making relatively good puppy progress until one day when she was 14 weeks old and she got hit by a car. Her leg was broken and she had to go back in the crate until it healed – six whole weeks. So everything she’d learned up to that point – her housebreaking, obedience, tricks, etc – just flew out the window during her six weeks of confinement. So when she finally did come out of the crate, she was a 5-month-old puppy starting from scratch. This might not have been such an issue, but the damn dog weighed more than 60 pounds at that point. Again, to put it in people-perspective, it was like having an infant in a fourth-grader’s body.

But I digress. Now that she’s 13 and really losing it, every day is a new (and not necessarily exciting) adventure. I never know what I’m going to wake up to. I also never know what time I’m going to wake up, because lately she’s taken to rousting me in the wee hours (no pun intended) to go out. Once she gets me out of bed and into the cold, dark night in my pajamas and whatever shoes I can stuff my feet into, whether they match or not, she stands in the yard and does…nothing. Not a thing. No poop, no pee, no sniffing, no digging, no scouting around for a place to leave her prize…nothing. She just stands there staring into space. After she does this for a minute, she looks back up at the house, sees me, and comes back up the steps and wants to go in. When I tell her, “no! You haven’t done anything yet!” and point back to the front yard, she trundles back down the steps only to stand motionless on the grass once more. After a few minutes I give up and let her back in and crawl back into my warm bed, and when I wake up a few hours later, there’s a nice, fresh pile and/or puddle waiting for me at the bottom of the basement stairs. So that has become my daily drill. Joy.

She’s reverting back to puppyhood, just like old people revert back to childhood when they go senile. This is challenging. She can’t hear, she sometimes falls down for no apparent reason (I think it’s an equilibrium thing related to her hearing loss), and she STINKS. I never expected to have to endure the puppy phase not only a second time (when she got hit by the car and had to re-learn everything), but a THIRD time now that’s she’s lost her mind. And I’m slowly losing mine as well now.

*yawn*

More on this later.