A couple of weeks ago, I took Maggie in to the vet for her regular checkup. As they get older, I approach these visits with increasing trepidation with every dog – mostly out of the fear that the vet will find something that should have been obvious to me, but that I missed simply due to familiarity, or that the regular blood work will show something new having gone out of whack since the last visit. For better or worse old dogs are just like old cars or old people – sometimes shit just stops working for no other reason than it’s old and broken.

Given Maggie’s last six months and the extensive vetting she had to get over her stomach trouble, I had lots of tests forming the baseline. Some of them I was expecting to be bad just as a matter of course. Others I expected to have gotten worse over time. It didn’t quite work out that way.

Maggie’s blood work came back with all the key data points “in range.” Even if it’s being held there through the advanced application of chemistry, it was as good a result as I could have hoped for – and not the one I was expecting. At a minimum, I went into this series of tests assuming that we’d be dialing up her medication to hold the same ground.

There’s no hiding the gray in her muzzle. My girl is still and old dog. She’s still got Cushings. But for the time being it hasn’t gotten worse. It’s still being effectively managed with her current dose of medication. Believe me when I tell you I don’t take that for granted for even a moment, because I know just how quickly the opposite can become true.

Although Maggie’s checkup was mostly good news, we’re headed over to the veterinary ophthalmologist in two weeks to get some small lumps and bumps looked at. One is purely cosmetic and has been there for a few years now, though it’s gotten bigger and is prone to bleeding when she rubs it. The other, most likely a small benign tumor or skin tag, is starting to form on the inside of her eyelid. This new one is the most troublesome to me since it’s in direct contact with her eye, though I’d like to see them both gone for her comfort and my peace of mind.