Hey APW,
I’ll be honest, it’s been a rough couple of weeks over in the Eisenhart household. After exhibiting some weird behavior, our giant puppy Gaia was recently diagnosed with an enlarged heart (prognosis: not good). It’s one of those diagnoses that comes on quickly and intensely, which means my house has shifted into dog maintenance mode pretty much overnight. We’re administering meds, changing diapers, waking up every few hours to let her outside, and generally trying to get the pee smell out of our living room. (Incontinence is a side effect of the drugs. Whee.) Our dog weighs 150 pounds, so none of this is a small feat, literally. Luckily, this is our second time at this particular rodeo, and a decade of marriage seems to be making all the difference in how we’re approaching things. (Much less fighting, yay.)
And in the meantime, I know better than to try and maintain my own standards when we’re in coping-and-figuring-it-out mode. Which means that I’ve been letting the laundry slide, eating take out, and giving myself permission to play hooky on the weekends when I should be doing chores. Before our dog got sick, I also finally caved and allowed myself to hire professional cleaners for my home, and y’all. It might be the best money I’ve ever spent. I don’t think I realized how much I hated cleaning until I wasn’t forcing myself through a marathon of folding and tidying every weekend just to feel like we were treading water.
Speaking of money, this ordeal with Gaia has reminded me that pet insurance is a godsend if you can get it. After our last dog put us in the hole to the tune of five figures, we unanimously decided to get insurance for any and all future creatures living our home. We’ve racked up almost three grand in vet bills in the last three weeks alone, with nearly 80 percent of costs covered after our deductible. So if you have a pet, and you don’t have insurance, I highly recommend getting it. (We have Healthy Paws, and really like them. We submit claims through their app and they get auto-deposited like a week or two later and our policy covers something like 90 percent of all non-routine care.) I don’t know any pet owners who haven’t had some kind of bullshit emergency come up at some point in the lifespan of their furry friends, so I’m pretty much a traveling pet insurance salesman at this point.
And that concludes today’s PSA. So go enjoy your happy hour. I’m going to go enjoy… a nap, I hope.
Cheers,
Maddie
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