I’ve been struggling at home with a somewhat new difficulty. This sounds super ominous but it’s actually not that big of a deal. My dog has poop incontinence.
Usually incontinence is about pee. Well, come to think of it Pudding (the dog in question) always had trouble holding her pee in when she was excited. When I came back home from work she’d always pee in joy as she rolled over the floor asking for a belly rub.
But now instead of that, she’s been dropping poop. Starting last year every once in a forgettable while we’d locate poop on the floor and I’d pick it up. My wife HATES poop of all shape and form while I have no problem cleaning it up, so it’s been me picking up poop every once in a while.
The cadence in which her poop drops has been increasing and pretty soon it became a daily ritual and on many days more often than that. I step on poop, I hear my wife scream from another room (which is usually an indicator that she stepped on poop), we lie down on the sofa to find that the sofa smells like poop because she pooped there… It hasn’t been great.
My hope was that it would be a temporary thing, but it kept on going and the worst part is when her poop would be runny. Solid dollops are easy to pick up and clean up, but when her gut’s not doing well there’s no way for her rectum to contain the… I won’t speak in further detail. Anyway, it’s bad.
We went to the vet and at the time she had an inflammation at her butt. We were hoping that the incontinence would go away by treating the inflammation. Unfortunately the inflammation calmed down but the incontinence stayed.
We returned to the vet and they said there’s nothing structurally wrong with her bum outside of some gland stuff. But she’s always had to express her glands pretty frequently but didn’t have this problem. So what could it be? They suggested we try adding more fiber to her diet first, and then come back to see if there’s a bigger medical problem.
So the fiber definitely helped, it’s drastically reduced the amount of runny poop. But still, this problem remains. What can we do now? We’ve went to the vet enough times to predict that they’ll just say there’s no problem. What could present as no problem on the surface but be a problem underneath?
Then all of a sudden it hit me: nerves.
My dog has degenerative disc disease from old age. She’s had back pain to the point of being unable to stand but from weight management and acupuncture she’s been able to move around to this day. Since this is a degenerative disease, it will only get worse with time and the only mercy we can get from time is the pace of the disease.
Now how I view the problem has changed. Well, for one, I’m able to see the root cause of it now so that certainly gives clarity. We all like clarity, don’t we? Secondly there’s a new reference point now.
Do I want my dog to walk around and drop poops, or do I want a dog who can’t move? Or in a more extreme way, do I want a dead dog?
Suddenly a poop dropping dog doesn’t sound all that bad.
My dogs turned 14 in January and after living such a long time together with them it still feels like they’re under the age of 10. But they’re both growing older and older. Every year they have less teeth, less hair, more warts, less energy… I keep thinking “something’s wrong with my dog” for a few months until I realize they’re just getting old.
Growing old and unhealthy seems bad when my reference point is comparing it to being young and healthy. Without that frame it’s just how it is.
As my wife needs care for her post-surgery recovery she’s been realizing how difficult a mobility-impaired life is. She keeps saying “I’m in my 30’s and just had one of the smallest surgeries I could ever have, is growing older going to be a way worse than this?”. It didn’t help that the nurses from the hospital gave her the exact kind of walker her grandma uses in Korea.
I jokingly tell her, “if I need care and it gets cumbersome just throw me away somewhere when I lose my mind. I’ll wake up and realize my time has come”. And I do mean this, to a large extent. Caretaking is really taxing and hard, I’m coming to see, and now that I’ve done it I think I’ll be more understanding of someone’s resistance in taking care of me.
I wrote up to the last paragraph before I needed to take a break from writing to take care of some stuff. Then I needed to have dinner so I boiled the bean curd soup and mixed in the rice we had left, and because that didn’t look like enough food I got one big piece of tahu isi (Indonesian fried tofu) and heated it up.
When the tahu isi was heated up I cut my wife’s into smaller pieces because she can’t really eat big things with her small mouth. Then I automatically put the scissors into the sink without giving it a second thought.
This moment stood out to me for some reason.
You see, when I cut up the tahu isi it’s actually easier for me to eat it too. The outside can be crispy to the point of being hard to cut off with the teeth, and the insides have veggies that are definitely easier to eat when cut up into smaller pieces.
But why did I almost instinctively throw the scissor away to the sink? Why don’t I do nice things for myself? The usual answer came up to me in my mind: I can just eat it the hard way no problem. I mean bro, of course you theoretically can, but why don’t you ever do nice things for yourself?
I realized I kinda believe that there’s a finite repository of energy for “nice things” I can do for any person. And I must believe that it is virtuous for me to spend it for other people rather than me.
But this is twofold false! Not only do I have enough energy to be nice for the both of us, and it’s virtuous of me to spend my loving energy on me too. What I needed to avoid was over-self-preservation and over-care-taking-at-the-expense-of-myself, and somehow I ended up doing both.
Curse me!
So I guess the lesson today is, sometimes it’s good to let a writing sit in the draft oven for a while as you go about doing other things. It can help you unlock additional areas of the mindscape you were exploring with your writing.
Will I now ask my wife to take care of me? Who knows, I guess I’ll have a stronger answer as I mindfully observe life pass me by.
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
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