Poor old Pearl. Earlier this summer she was just old and crankie, but still pretty lively.
But in the last few weeks she's deteriorated very quickly indeed. She now appears to be almost totally blind, but wanders around the house well enough.
This week end she appeared to have just lost her sense of smell too. I have to tap her food bowl to help her find it, even though she is only inches from it.
Her loss of the sense of smell seems to have had a greater detrimental effect on her ability to find her way around than her loss of sight did. She now gets "lost" down the wrong end of the living room, getting stuck in a corner when she's trying to go to the kitchen for her food or to the spare room bed where we now let her sleep. It's heart breaking to see her obvious confusion when this happens.
Mrs. B. asked me if I thought we should do anything about it. We decided no. She's not in any obvious pain. I guess she's not happy being confused all the time, but we'd rather she just ebbed away here with us.
I leave for Birmingham on Monday night and I won't be back until a week Thursday. I'm really not sure if I'll see her again.
