Ruby is heading into her final days.
The lump has grown, and she has been limping more. She has spent most of hers days in bed for a while but has just started losing weight, and wanting to be carried on walks. No topless photo as I’ve had complaints about how disgusting her lump is, but here is a picture of her after our walk to the beach just now.
It’s a gorgeous day up here so I thought I’d take them down to the beach for one of her final walks. The dogs have always loved the beach. The tide was mostly out, and there weren’t many people around, so I let Goofy and the other schnoodle off their leads, and walked into the surf out to where there is a shallow sandbar. Well, there’s always been a shallow sandbar there, I don’t know what’s happened to it but the water got deeper and deeper as I was wading in, my arms full of leads, turd-loaded poo bags, and cancer dog. I could see the shallower part just ahead of me, but there was a sudden deeper section just before it, where the water reached all the way up to the crotch on my fashionable cut offs (not fashionable actually as home made from an old pair of jeans). The water was indeed slightly less deep once I reached the sandbar, and I headed parallel to the beach, trying to find where the sandbar curved in towards the shore. Just then , I noticed some grey fins flapping around in the water in front of me. It was probably a ray of some sort, or maybe a dog fish, but then the thought came unbidden into my mind about how the majority of shark attacks happen in less than three feet of water, and I was just nervously calculating the depth of the water around me when I heard Goofy barking on the beach. She’d tried half heartedly to follow me into the water when I first went in, but wisely abandoned the attempt when the waves went over her head. Following me along the beach, she’d come across two women who’d just come out of the water and barked at them. Considering the parlous state I was in, I could hardly spare much attention for her, but I did notice to my dismay one of the women shouting angrily at me “Control your dog!”, which would possibly have been fair in any other situation but I did feel was asking a bit much under the circumstances. I would surmise this was someone lacking in what psychologists would call ‘theory of mind’ or otherwise “what the hell do you think I can do about it right now??” Luckily she stalked off at that moment, probably to ring the police to complain, and Goofy lost interest in her.
We made it back home eventually but my arms are tired and I’m pooped, as is Ruby, as you can see from the photo above. Hopefully she enjoyed it, in spite of everything. Being shouted at by random strangers isn’t the sort of thing to cause dogs to lose much sleep, I suspect.