Ok, I just have to share this, because it made me laugh out loud.

I have an old italian greyhound, Jessie. She’s estimated to be about 13 (I’ve had her for 2 years this month, she lived with her previous owner 9 years, and is probably a puppy mill rescue, meaning she was most likely 2 when she went to the previous owner, so I’m estimating her age at 13, having arbitrarily assigned her a Jan 1 birthday).

Anyway, the poor old dear is half-blind thanks to cataracts, half-deaf thanks to old age, and on prednisone and enalapril thanks to liver problems and a heart murmur. The cataracts obscure almost the entire eye, and Doc says the prednisone probably exacerbates them. Last summer we decided she was half-blind. This spring, I’ve noticed that she doesn’t seem to notice me if I’m more than three feet away, so I’m figuring she’s probably 3/4 blind at this point.

Her meds make her terribly thirsty, but if she drinks too much water too fast, it makes her vomit. So I try to limit her water intake, while also making sure she gets all the water she needs. She’s also a greedy-guts.

So I was just watching her walk over to the water dish and start to drink. And drink. And drink. Sometimes it seems that she doesn’t even stop to breathe, she just keeps lapping it up. So I walked over, picked up the water dish, and put it out of her reach. She looked at me when I came over, with that slightly worried, quizzical expression she does so well, and as soon as I sat down again, she lowered her head to where the water dish had recently been, to resume drinking.

Maybe you had to be there, but it was so cute (and somehow sad at the same time) to see her sniffing the area where the plastic bowl had used to be, trying to figure out how the water had magically disappeared.

It really did make me laugh out loud.