Funeral QuestionsMy Dog Had a Genuinely Good Morning — Then I Went Ahead With the Euthanasia Appointment That Afternoon
Asked by brindled_pocket5 ·
Max was diagnosed with cancer six weeks ago and the vet had been honest the whole way through that we were on borrowed time. Three days ago we'd booked the appointment for that afternoon because he'd had two rough days in a row (not eating properly, struggling to get up). Then that morning he suddenly seemed almost like himself. Ate a full breakfast, wanted to go out in the yard, even tried to play a bit.
I still went ahead with the appointment. Everyone (the vet included) said his good moments were going to keep getting rarer and further apart even if that particular morning looked better, and that waiting for a "worse" day to make it feel more obviously right would probably just mean more suffering in between. But three days on I can't stop replaying that morning and wondering if I jumped the gun on a dog who still had some good days left in him. Did I get this wrong?
3 Replies
I want to say clearly: a good morning right before the appointment is one of the most common things I see, and it doesn't mean the decision was wrong. Cancer in particular doesn't decline in a straight line. There are real, sometimes near-daily swings, and a temporary rally is a well-documented pattern, not a sign the underlying trajectory has changed. The question was never whether he could still have one good morning; it's whether good mornings were still outnumbering the bad days overall, and by your own account, two rough days in a row after weeks of decline says that pattern had already shifted.
What you're describing is actually the hardest version of this decision, not evidence you got it wrong: waiting for every day to be uniformly bad before acting usually means far more suffering in the stretch before that happens, and most owners who wait for total certainty end up wishing they'd acted sooner, not later. You didn't have that regret because you and your vet made the call on the pattern, not on one moment. That good morning was a gift Max got to have, not a sign the timing failed him.
From the other side of this, I see a lot of families in the days right after, and the "but they had a good morning" thought is one of the most common things people carry in with them. Almost every family who's made this decision with a vet's involvement, on a real pattern of decline rather than a single afternoon, has actually made a caring and reasonable call. The guilt tends to fade before the love does, if that's any comfort right now.
I went through a smaller version of this with my cat Biscuit a little while back, not cancer, just old age and kidneys giving out, but the same second-guessing afterwards. I kept replaying whether I'd acted on a bad afternoon rather than the whole picture. It did ease, though it took longer than I expected. For what it's worth, from someone a few weeks further down this exact road than you: the replaying gets quieter, even if it doesn't disappear completely.
Related Discussions
My Boss Said 'It's Just a Cat' When I Asked for a Day Off — Was I Wrong to Ask?
My cat Biscuit died on Sunday. She was 14, I'd had her since I was 22, and the vet came to the house to put her to sleep because her kidneys
My daughter is grieving our dog harder than she grieved her dad — is that normal?
We had to put Bruno down last Thursday. Thirteen years old, back legs had basically given out, a few mornings he just couldn't get up on his