Click images for desktop size: "Binnies" by LeviTaTe Around here everyone is crabby.
Crabbier than usual.
Lack of sleep. I'm used to that. No one else here is.
Its not a "skill" I'm normally proud of.
The issue is my little blind dog.
He's been wheezing for months. The wheeze developed into a hacking cough. Been treating that with mixed results.
The severity of the cough has lessened, but the duration of it has . . . its like non-stop. Fifteen minutes is a blessing, 20 minutes is a miracle. Twenty minutes of silence.
The sound is like you imagine as the death rattle of some Dickensian character about to lay out some final prophesy.
Its wet, constant and must be painful.
Most of the crabbiness comes, not from lack of sleep but from everything that cough makes us face: Mortality. The sick joke that our dogs are destined to not out live us. The sicker joke that we're not going to outlive most of the people walking around today.
When confronted with a beloved friends mortality its impossible to not be aware of your own mortality, of your life and all the negatives.
You know there are postives but you can't think of positives when your thoughts and portals to dreams are always disrupted by a racking painful lunger that is always just off center, right about there. Its a pain you can't bear.
Poor dog.
Poor us.