Geriatric Challenges

She is stone deaf, missing an eye, almost totally blind in the other, has a floppy ear and now she walks in circles, staggers and stumbles, bumps things and holds her head at an angle.  It is very confusing for her and, though occasionally amusing, is also another dog lesson for me.  On the positive side, she is eating heartily, is  happy to go for a walk and is overcoming her infirmity amazingly well.  She doesn't even care if she looks a bit funny.  Most positive of all, she has a condition from which she will recover, called "old dog vestibular syndrome", although her head will always tilt, as it now does, to the left.  She's already walking in a straight line much of the time. 

Dogs teach us many things, not the least of which is that with advancing age, stuff happens.  Dogs just adjust and handle these things.  I wonder whether, as I age, I will be able to accept and adjust as well.  If Princess were a "people", she'd be in a "home", sitting in her wheel chair with head tilted and probably drooling.  Should that happen to me, I hope someone will come and visit me anyway and, hopefully, remember, as I do with my Princess, the happy days when I ran through the fields with her, jumping, climbing and tunneling just as fast as she could go.