[Dailydrool] Elsinore has retired

[Elizabeth Lindsey]

I’ve just announced this on Facebook, which makes it official—our Elsinore has retired after eight years of pet therapy work at a nearby hospice. She’d been on summer sabbatical again because she’s become quite intolerant of heat as she’s aged. The necessary walk around the block so she can take care of personal business before entering the hospice residence has become a real ordeal for her the last two summers. She arrives all in a lather, breathing heavily, drooling, and searching for a drink—not at all ready to punch in for work. So she became a seasonal worker.

This summer, however, I’ve been watching her closely and coming to the unhappy realization that she’s no longer up for the workload expected of her. While Elsinore's enthusiasm remains undiminished, her age-related physical limitations are increasing in a way that makes me fear the quality of her visits would no longer be as high as they’ve been. 

In addition to being unable to tolerate outdoor temperatures over 80 degrees, her back legs have visibly lost strength over the course of this summer, and they become shaky much sooner than they used to. We’re wondering whether that’s the result of nothing more than normal advancing age (she’s 12 or 13 maybe?), or if it’s an indication that the soft-tissue sarcoma tumor on her hip we had debulked last summer is growing back in a way that has it snaking around deep inside her back end, causing nerve and muscle issues. 

Her cataracts are thickening, and her hearing isn’t always what it used to be either, and not in a way we can blame on selectiveness either. Worst of all, her coat has coarsened and become greasy and flecked with dandruff, and the effects of a bath last only about a day instead of almost a week. She’s on premium dog food (Fromm’s), and I’ve tried sardine/anchovy oil supplements (she loved them) and three-omega supplements (she hated them) and seen no improvement. 

To compound the coat problem, Elsinore has also become considerably less cooperative when I need to help her with her personal hygiene. She puts up an uncharacteristic and vehement resistance to toenail trimming, especially her back feet (is the tumor’s regrowth causing nerve problems that make her those feet super sensitive?). Cleaning her ears and trimming her toenails can take a couple of days now, with my having to catch her unawares to do a few more snips. 

Last winter she also started having trouble staying warm after her pre-hospice-visit bath. I would bathe her and then have to cover her up with a blanket and hot water bottle to stop her shivering. I’m concerned that, being a year older now, she will have more trouble with that this winter. 

Elsinore has loved her job with every intense fiber of her intense being. She has loved schmoozing with all her human hospice colleagues—the nurses, support staff, and security guard (turns out she has a real thing for men in uniform)—for the past eight years, and she will miss making her monthly rounds to meet new friends and visit with old ones. 

My heart hurts at the thought of her not being able to do what she loves anymore, and I spent most of the summer pondering ways to help her stay just a bit longer. But in the end I decided that it’s far better to leave on a high note than to leave because one’s supervisor has had to take one aside and quietly suggest it may be time to seriously consider retiring. Like, now. 

It was only a few days after we brought Elsinore home from Basset Hound Rescue of Alabama in March 2004 that we realized she had real potential to be a pet therapy dog. She’s confident, self-directed, unafraid of new settings and people, and highly focused on getting everyone she met to pat her or at least acknowledge her presence. Most of the time I’ve been at the hospice with her, I’ve felt as I was there only to open the doors for her; she could do her job perfectly well without me getting in her way. With those qualities, I believed that to not get her into pet therapy would be akin to forcing her to hide her light under a bushel, and I didn’t want that on my conscience.

I am grateful to Alive Hospice in Nashville, Tennessee, for giving our Elsinore a place to let her light shine so brightly for so long. She's had a wonderful opportunity to do meaningful work she’s enjoyed tremendously. I’d like to think her shining light has been a blessing to the people she crossed paths with at the hospice. Their appreciation for her interest in them has certainly been a blessing to her.

Elizabeth