Beau Stopped Coming Upstairs at Night. I Told Myself He Was Eleven.

Beau's slept on the same three feet of carpet at the foot of our bed since the spring we brought him home. On the twenty-eighth of May I came down for water at some absurd hour and found him at the bottom of the stairs in the dark, awake, chin on his paws, pointed up at me.

He thumped his tail twice. He didn't get up.

I said come on, buddy, in the voice, and he looked at the first tread and then back at me, and I got it in about a second and a half. I'd been watching this for months and filing it under something else.

He's eleven. That's the explanation I'd been running on autopilot since around Christmas, and it's a good explanation, which is exactly the problem with it.

The cupboard over the microwave

I'm close to the worst possible person to sell a supplement to, and I can prove it, because I still have most of them. I cleaned that cupboard out in June and looked up what I'd paid where I could find the order.

That's $146.42 of nothing, and it isn't even the whole cupboard, because two containers had lost their labels and I threw those out without an autopsy.

The pattern bothers me more than the money does. Every one got ordered inside about forty-eight hours of a bad morning, me at ten at night with my thumb on a checkout button, buying a feeling. Then the good week gets credited to whatever showed up Thursday, and then it ends and the tub goes in the cupboard. I knew I was running that loop and I ran it anyway.

None of that had to prove anything to anybody before it went on a shelf. Some of it might still be fine. But the finding out is your job, and you're a lousy study: one dog, no control group, and you already want it to work.

Marta Quinn, CVT

Which is roughly where you should have this. One of the things below is a supplement, and I have spent years telling people that most of those do nothing. If that makes you read the rest with your arms folded, fold them. Mine were folded the whole time.

The things I'd already explained away

Once I sat down and thought back, the stairs were nowhere near the first thing. Maybe the eighth.

• He quit getting up for the mail carrier over the winter. I told my sister he'd finally matured, which is a hilarious thing to say about a lab.
• Around February he stopped jumping into the wagon. I'd been lifting his back end for months without noticing I was doing it (I've got a bad wrist I'd been blaming on a laptop).
• On the flat by the river he still trotted. On the hill up to the car he walked, and he'd never once walked up that hill.
• The hallway runner over the bare boards, every single time. Didn't clock it until I read what slick floors do to a dog who's stopped trusting his back legs.

Any one alone is a shrug, and Marta's written about the quiet ones she missed in her own hallway. Stacked up they're a paragraph. I never wrote the paragraph.

The appointment

June 9, our regular clinic, first slot after lunch. I filmed him on the stairs the night before, because I had a feeling he'd perform beautifully in an exam room. He did. He trotted down their hallway like a dog in a brochure.

She walked him up and back twice, got on the floor with him, checked his knees for the drawer thing they do when they're ruling out a torn ligament. He didn't yelp. On the left hip he started licking his own lips, over and over, which she said is what a lot of dogs do instead of complaining.

What she ruled out matters more to me now than what she found. No torn cruciate, and the tick panel came back clean. Bloodwork boring, which is the word she used and the word you want. Nothing on the films that surprised her about a lab who's been landing off decks for a decade. What's left, she said, is the back end of an old dog, and there's no version of this where he gets to be six again.

Exam, bloodwork and two sets of films came to $438.60, no discount. Your number will be different, so call and ask. The front desk will just tell you.

She sent us home with six weeks of mechanical work, a recheck, and a prescription I'm not naming, because the dose belongs to Beau and to the person who examined him. She also said he'd crept back up in weight, which stung, since I once put this household through thirty days of weighing his food.

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Then I changed everything at once, like an idiot

Before anything else: I changed five things at home inside one week, on top of the prescription, and I can't tell you which of them did what.

Runners down the hallway and around the island, $167 for three. A folding ramp, $89, which he refused for nine days. Nine days of me in a parking lot going come on, buddy, in an increasingly thin voice, and on the tenth he walked up it like he'd invented it. Food back on the scale. Two short walks a day instead of one long one. And a powder from a company called Again, a peptide supplement made for senior dogs, which goes on dinner and which he has never once questioned.

They'd emailed me in April and I ignored it. They emailed again a week after the appointment, and I told them I'd try it on one dog and write down whatever happened, including nothing.

Six weeks on the back of an envelope

I write things on envelopes. There's no system, it's just where the pen is.

June 16. Nothing. Hates the runners. Keeps tripping on the edge of the one by the island.

June 21, nothing again. Felt stupid. Considered not writing this.