I know in the midst of the convention and election, all conversations lead to politics, the economy, foreign policy, and who has made us mad. This isn't an issue that will even come up in the campaign. But it's one my dog is forcing me to think about:
Euthanasia.
My dog is old. Fifteen. She's given us beauty, laughter, and a whole lot of lessons in kindness and forgiveness over the years. She hasn't had an easy life. Abandoned at two, apparently mistreated badly, rescued by us. With us she was loved and cherished, but that didn't make her life easy. Until Molly, I never knew a dog could need a bronchoscopy, or antibiotics that cost $200 a month. She's had one medical problem after another, and has had more surgeries than my entire family. Molly went through life the hard way. Her vet file is inches thick. The point is, nothing ever got her down. She kept right on being a loving, forgiving, happy soul.
But now she's 15. She has degenerative disc disease that has made her lame. She gets cortisone for that, and hangs her head in embarrassment when the cortisone makes her lose control of her bladder. And now there appears to be another abscess growing around the root of one of her teeth. Too old to operate on, there is only one course of treatment left for her.
Euthanasia.
I know a lot of you have had to do this in your lives, and you know how hard it is, but that's not what I want to write about.
I want to ask why it is, if I don't put my suffering dog down now that she's too old for treatment, I can be charged with animal cruelty or neglect? Why is it illegal for me to "let nature take its course?" (Not that I would. I love that dog too much to let her suffer.)
Yet when my mother lay in a nursing home, losing herself to dementia, in such pain from a bedsore that she screamed virtually nonstop, every effort was made to keep her going, despite her repeated pleas to let her die. Why was it that after two months during which, in her lucid moments, she asked for last rights and repeatedly said she wanted to die, she was still hanging on in agony with a medical team devoted to keeping her that way?
Until at last my uncle stepped in and called hospice. At that point the nursing home staff felt she had another few months. Hospice said, "Once we ease her pain, she'll feel relaxed enough to stop fighting." Eighteen hours later, my mother flew away. About time.
So why is that? Why is it that we feel that humans, despite their express wishes, should have to endure something that would get us criminally charged if we allowed it to happen to a dog? Or a horse? Or a cat?
Why is such mercy available to our pets, but not our family? Why are we cruel to animals if we keep them going as we're required by law to do with our human loved ones? My mother was never going to recover. Never. Everyone knew that. So why did she have to scream in pain hour after hour, why did she have to beg for death only to have it righteously withheld?
My dog won't have to beg. It'll nearly kill me to have to choose the day and hour. And looking at her, I find myself thinking of what my mother endured and wondering what the hell is wrong with this picture?
(And please don't tell me it's because of insurance. Medicare barely dented the expenses my mother incurred in the nursing home.)