Waiting For Miss Betty
It was almost three years ago that we adopted Betty (a.k.a. Cheyanne, the senior stray dog that was picked up on the streets of East L.A.). Betty has diabetes and, at the time we adopted her, was blind and scrawny. She has since had her teeth fixed (mostly pulled), had cataract surgery, and put on a regimen of daily eye drops and vitamins, not to mention a combination of very healthy handmade fresh meat and vegetable meals and lots of protein snacks like turkey hearts and other dried nuggets. Betty is about 15-16 years old now and weighs 18 pounds. She can see well enough to get around and not bump into things. Her hearing is shot, but we think her sense of smell is pretty much in tact. She can certainly smell anything approximating human food when we quietly prepare it for ourselves. She sleeps an inordinate amount, which I claim to be close to 20 hours per day. SHe has a mid-morning nap, an early afternoon nap, a late afternoon nap, and evening nap and then, of course, a long and sound night’s sleep. She is a bit of a snorer who can rattle her respiratory cage with the best of them.
Besides sleeping and eating, Betty’s days consist of several walks through the neighborhood on the leash, done by some combination of Kim and Colean, unless Natasha is in town for coverage due to some trip we might be taking. Other than that, she does do a bit of snuggling for companionship in the morning and evening, but I suspect most of that is used to determine whether we have any food available to give her as a treat. Whatever interstitial time she has in between her activities is spent standing or sitting staring off into space. Betty is an old gal who has a rather vacuous way about her. You get the sense that she really doesn’t know what is going on most of the time. In that regard she is much like any other aged being, including humans we all know that are in the same state.
Where Betty sleeps is about as random as anything else she does. Kim has several comfortable dog beds for her use, but Betty only rarely goes into any of those. She will usually sleep on the floor, favoring the luxury vinyl on warm days and the carpet on cooler days. She rarely sleeps on the bed with us, but can often be found on the bed in the afternoon, when she is less likely to be bothered. She will also rather randomly go up on the sofa to sleep for reasons unknown, but one would think its for comfort if such thoughts occur to her.
Betty’s bathroom habits are not the best. She is technically house-broken, but that seems mostly meaningless because as much as she can hold her water, as they say, for quite extended periods of time like the long overnight stretch, she doesn’t really care about the mess she makes if she does relieve herself indoors. Like all animals, she is smart enough to know that she should find a less trafficked area to do her business. Unless she is in some sort of distress, she does that at the far end of the dining room and the Western side of the main living room. We have determined that Betty knows she is supposed to go outside, but she also knows that peeing on the floor or rug is a way to express herself and get our attention. She is particularly prone to doing that when we have guests staying with us and her regular routine is somehow disrupted. Her expression of displeasure at not being the complete center of household attention is quite apparent. We keep the guest room hall door closed at all times and advise our guests to do likewise because otherwise she will make a new bathroom out of one of guest room rugs whenever she can.
Our biggest current concern is our living room rug. Our living room is split into two sections, the area surrounding the TV and the general seating arrangement area where we sit and talk to our guests. We have rugs in both areas and Betty has never soiled the one by the TV, but has laid claim to the one in the general seating area. We had a favorite rug of Kim’s there, one with turquoise in it and quite abstractly handsome. Betty managed to ruin it by peeing so badly and repeatedly on it that when it went out to the specialty rug cleaners, they were unable to get the stains out, so we rolled it up and put it in the garage for an indeterminate outcome (most likely to give away to someone who didn’t mind the stain.
When that happened, Kim and I discussed what to do about the general seating area of the living room, which we use almost every day. We decided that we would buy a cheap rug to put down temporarily, one that we wouldn’t be bothered by staining yet again if that happened. Kim found a $300 one of the appropriate size and put it down along with some peepee pads a the western end. Betty will regularly walk right over to that end of the rug and squat down to pee on the pads, right before our eyes. At her age, we figure trying to teach this old dog new tricks is unreasonable. For some reason, Betty seems to have caught onto the game and gradually, Kim has had to place more and more peepee pads over more than half of the rug on the western end.
When we went to Egypt a few months ago, we decided to buy a new rug for the living room, one made of lovely Egyptian Cotton. When it arrived we had nowhere to lay it flat to get the kinks out of it, so I suggested putting it underneath our cheap rug since that seemed unlikely to get any damage. And then our cleaning girls told us that Betty was peeing so much on that side that it was soaking through the pads, through the cheap rug and onto the new rug. We had it cleaned and rolled up and put in the garage with out original damaged rug. No permanent harm was done to the new rug, but we also decided not to risk it any further. At one point, she did so much damage to the cheap rug that Kim rolled that one up too and put that in the garage as well. She bought a replica new cheap rug and down it went, only this time with even more peepee pads on it. I think it si fair to say that the rug is now 90% covered with pads, which makes you wonder what exactly the point of all of this is.
I have said to Kim that we should just take up the living room rug altogether and let her pee on the luxury vinyl flooring since it is relatively easy to clean up. Kim is afraid that Betty will just find another, less convenient place to pee and do even more floor covering damage. We are now at a bit of a loss as to what to do. We make good use of all of our house so its not like the living room is an unused room for us. It is a pain in the neck to have peepee pads all across the living and dining room floors. But Betty doesn’t seem to mind one bit, and furthermore, Betty isn’t showing any signs of slowing down or coming to the end of her road.
We don’t really like to think of it this way, but we got Betty so that we could give her a loving home for her final years and she certainly seems to be enjoying those much more than she had been. That should be a good thing, but this peepee pad issue makes us feel like we are referencing and making decisions on what to do based on our waiting for Miss Betty to cross the rainbow bridge. When she does, we will miss Miss Betty, but we will not miss the peepee pads.