Six Early Arthritis Signs I Missed in My Own Dog

Birdie stopped at the bottom of the stairs on a Tuesday in February and looked up at them like she was doing arithmetic.

Then she went up. No limp. Nothing you would put in a chart. She just took a beat first. I was carrying a laundry basket and I remember thinking, with zero alarm, huh, she is getting old.

I have been a certified veterinary technician for fourteen years. Most of my job is asking owners a version of the same question: has anything changed at home. Then I watched my own dog hesitate at that staircase for eight months before I said the word arthritis out loud.

From inside the house they do not look like signs. They look like a dog getting older, which is an explanation you accepted a while ago and stopped examining.

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The six things I explained away

Not one of these would have sent me to the clinic on its own. Each has a perfectly good innocent explanation, and I supplied every one myself.

She started pausing at the stairs

She never refused, which is what let me off the hook.

Half a second at the bottom, sometimes a full second, and then up she went, fine. Coming down looked smoother, which fooled me further, because in my head a sore dog would obviously struggle in both directions.

What I understand now, from phone video, is that she had changed how she started. She used to hit the first tread mid-stride, no setup. By February she was squaring her back feet first, then pushing.

She was sitting crooked

I have eleven photos of this on my phone because I thought it was funny. Birdie would sit with her hips rolled off to one side and a back leg kicked out sideways, like a kid sprawled in front of a TV. In an exam room I would have flagged it for the doctor. At home it was the frog sit. A thing she did.

A dog who used to sit square and now slides off one hip may have stopped folding both sides the same way because it costs her something. Might be nothing. Ask someone to put hands on those hips anyway.

She stopped standing still

Standing at the front door while I dug through the bowl for her leash, she would shift. Weight coming off one hind leg and going back, off and back, like a person who has been in a grocery line too long.

I clock this in a stranger's dog in about twenty seconds, and on my own kitchen floor I looked straight past it for eight months.

She licked one wrist, constantly

Her right carpus had a damp patch on it most evenings and the fur over it had gone the rusty color saliva turns pale fur. I decided it was grass seed, bought a canister of unscented wipes for $13.99, and felt like I had handled it.

She started taking the long way around the coffee table

Our living room has a low table with one bad corner, and for years Birdie cut it tight, pivoting on her back end. Then she stopped. She began arcing wide, a loop that added a step and a half to every trip to her water bowl.

I noticed. I thought she had gotten polite about the furniture.

Tight turns load a hind end unevenly. Same family as the way she began choosing the runner over the bare hallway floor, which I only understood after reading what slick floors do to a dog who has lost confidence in her back legs.

She stopped meeting me at the door

This is the one that finally got me, and it is the one that still stings.

For nine years Birdie met me at the door. Whole body wag, that ridiculous full-torso thing shepherds do where the back half arrives second. Then sometime in spring she started greeting me from her bed instead. Tail going hard against the mattress, head up, delighted, just not up. I told a friend she had mellowed, and I said it in the voice you use for something you want to be true.