[10/365] just old dog things

I briefly mentioned the problems we started having with Gary a few months ago where he got aggressive with us whenever we tried to put a harness or collar on him. It's meant we have had to give up taking him for walks which fucking breaks my heart but we make sure he gets plenty of time in the garden and we do games and stuff with him to burn off his energy and give him enrichment for sniffing etc.

And we've got by but then last week the vet called and asked if Gary could come in for like the dog equivalent of a meds review. I asked D if he'd be able to drive us and he said "yeah if we can get the harness on Gary I can drive him there no problem." I'd sorta forgotten about that -- I was already mentally running through the challenges of Gary and the vet and I had totally neglected to take this into account.

We ended up just having to brute force it this morning. All the restraint and injury-management (human injuries, Gary has never been hurt) tactics we're used to from clipping Gary's nails -- which he hates -- has to be called upon again.

It objectively went as well as it could but I was massively sleep-deprived and I found it surprisingly distressing so that wasn't fun or helpful. I let him run around the living room about his feelings, on his extendable leash, and he had a lot of Feelings that he took out on the legs of my new corduroys, but I was able to drag him out the door that way and once I had he was fine!

He jumped up into the backseat of the car, let me clip him into the seatbelt thing, and behaved totally fine and normal both on his way to and at the vet's. I had to pick him up to get him in the building, but that's normal and he didn't even snap at me or anything. He sat on my lap while we waited. (I got to commiserate with the vet tech at the reception desk while we waited, and that helped. She has an old dog with dementia too. It's such a particular kind of experience, so it helped to have company in that. Plus she always says she loves Gary (she said that when I was just there to pick up meds a few weeks ago, he wasn't even with me then!). She said she had already told someone else about Gary this morning and that she was excited when she saw he was coming in today. Aww.)

And he wouldn't let me put him down after that: for a dog that never lets me pick him up these days it was really unusual. I couldn't put him down on the table for the vet to examine, he climbed up my arm and clutched onto me. So they took blood while I was holding him, had to shave a little part of his neck and he was totally good and still the whole time -- he handled it better than I do blood draws!

The blood test was just to make sure his meds aren't affecting anything, and already this afternoon I got a call saying everything was spot on. We praised Gary for acing his blood tests because he's such a clever boy.

Not long after that mother_bones got a text saying the cleaners were on their way -- they always text when they're leaving the previous house. This was news to us though as they usually come on Fridays! Between the three of us on adventures this morning and mother_bones being sleep deprived after a bad asthma night, we were all exhausted. It actually meant Gary behaved himself better than he usually does (things he hates: 1. strangers in the house 2. vacuum cleaners), maybe too tired to kick off. But I felt bad for abandoning mother_bones to the pre-cleaners tidying (and I had laundry everywhere) and the first part of the dog-wrangling, while I was working.

After the cleaners left a couple hours later, we were all even more exhausted. We got takeaway (from the veggie curry place we haven't gotten food from in ages!) and I've been having to actively try not to fall asleep since 7.