I was talking to a friend the other day. We both love our dogs, and this friend — she’s about 10 years my senior — was talking about getting another puppy.
Since we lost our beloved Sadie in the autumn of 2020, we’ve been thinking of getting a companion for her remaining sister, Maggie. I, however, balk at the idea of another puppy.
Not (well, not just) because of the amount of work a good pet parent must put into raising a well-behaved puppy. More so, I said out loud something that many of us living with multiple sclerosis (MS) have niggling in the dark corners of our mind. For me, the manifestation was “I don’t want to die on a dog.”
How Would a Puppy’s Life Expectancy Compare With Mine?
Wheaten terriers have an average life span of 12 to 14 years. Our Sadie lived well into her 16th year. And I’m coming up on my 57th birthday this summer.
If I do the arithmetic, it goes something like this:
The U.S. Social Security Administration says that the average life expectancy of a male born in 1966 is 76 years at birth and 78.5 years if he makes it to age 65.
Couple that with what the UK National Health Service (NHS) states about MS life expectancy: “The average life expectancy for people with MS is around 5 to 10 years lower than average, and this gap appears to be getting smaller all the time.”
The figures come out to (averages here, people) 73.5 at best, and 66 at the other side of what I might expect.
Now adding in the variable of a new puppy: 57 (me) + 12 (the short side of a wheaten puppy’s life span) = 69, damned near the middle of that 7.5 year spread.
So, a puppy is right out.
I’ve Still Got a Good Bit of Living to Do
The other thing that doing that equation told me is that (again, averages) I can reasonably look at 12 to 16.5 more years. I hope and will plan to outlive those averages. Test results from a recent visit to the GP showed that I’m a healthy man living with this chronic illness, so I like my chances.
But the fact of the matter is that there ain’t none of us getting out of here alive, and MS seems to make our stay here a bit shorter than everyone else’s. So, it’s time to do the living we hope to do, folks.
For us, that means looking for an older dog to join Maggie on her now middle-aged adventures. (How is she nearly 10 already?!) It also means paying attention to those end-of-life decisions we’ll all have to face eventually.
Letting the Reality of Life Expectancy Sink In
I’ve always been a “head before heart” guy. I needed the bones of five years to get my head around what MS was doing to my body (and my life) before I could even start getting my heart around living with the disease.
Doing this quick arithmetic here has focused my head on the cold facts of a (probably) shortened timeline of life.
Funny enough, I’ve found a sort of comfort in this exercise. Or maybe it’s more a lack of discomfort with the idea that I don’t know that I would have expected, had I thought about thinking about it, if you know what I mean. But now I’ll stop doing the math.
We’ll put that information to work where it needs to work. I’ll also put it to good use as my heart continues living my best possible life — diseased or not.
As the lead characters in The Shawshank Redemption put it, it comes down to a simple choice: “Get busy living or get busy dying.”
So, lads. Let’s get busy living.
Wishing you and your family the best of health.
Cheers,
Trevis
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