When Your Pet Is Ill
For the weeks an animal you love is sick and the decisions keep coming. It keeps the vet's answers, the costs and the medication times in one place, and treats the worry as real rather than something to apologize for.
Pets · Caregiving · Worry · 9 items · once a week
The checklist
- Write down what you have noticed, with dates — the vet asks questions you cannot answer from memory.
- Ask what the next week is likely to look like — a picture of what is coming beats guessing between visits.
- Get the cost of each option in writing — money is part of this decision and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
- Put the medication times on a timer — dosing a frightened animal is hard enough without also remembering.
- Set up one room so nothing is a climb — water, bed and litter or pads within a few steps.
- Tell one person who will take it seriously — people who shrug at pet news are not the ones to tell.
- Keep one piece of your own routine — the walk, the meal, the bedtime; your days still need edges.
- Write down what a good day looks like for them — the mark is easier to set now than in a waiting room.
- Let yourself feel it before anything happens — dreading the loss is already a kind of grieving.
Use this checklist Free account: tick items off and keep each day's record.
How to use it
Run through it once a week, honestly and without scoring yourself. A checklist is a way of noticing, not a test: an item you cannot tick is information about the day, not a verdict on you. Over a few weeks the pattern of what gets ticked and what does not says more than any single pass.
With a free Theraglee account the checklist remembers each pass, so you can look back. Without one, you can still read it here and keep your own copy.