Lucy’s Pills

My dog, Lucy, who turned 13 last month, takes two daily medications now—one for her skin allergy, the other for heart disease. The heart one is new. She had an echocardiogram a few weeks ago and the vet determined that the dog’s cardiac condition has worsened since the last check.

I don’t think we’ve reached the dire stage yet, but Lucy is of advanced age by canine standards. If you ask me, the life span of dogs is way too brief. It’s a design flaw of the species—maybe the only one. Well, that and sniffing one another’s butts as a form of greeting.

According to the vet, signs that the heart situation has deteriorated further include exercise intolerance, breathing abnormalities (such as increased effort or respiratory rate), and coughing. I haven’t noticed any of those symptoms in Lucy, so that’s an encouraging sign.

Unless, of course, napping for 20 hours a day counts as exercise intolerance.

When Lucy was young, I could work up a good cry by thinking about the limited number of years we’d be spending together. We’d by lying on the couch, say, and she’d be asleep on my chest (for she has always been a champion napper), and I would get all choked up in a state of before-the-fact mourning. Let’s call it prereavement.

Now that she has truly reached her autumn years, however, I recognize that behavior of mine as the silly self-indulgence it was. I mean, get some real problems, you know? Maybe I can’t help having a propensity for the elegiac, but, for heaven’s sake, I should wait to express sorrow for what’s lost until it’s actually lost.

In fact, it’s possible that a better approach to confronting Lucy’s mortality has been modeled from the start by my husband, Frank, who has been and remains in complete denial about any outcome that doesn’t involve Lucy being around to nap through the next three Summer Olympic Games at least.

He simply won’t acknowledge the end is nigh, and I’ve become half-convinced that’s the key to happiness.  

Brisbane 2032, here we come.

You’ve probably heard that the way to calculate a dog’s human-age equivalent is to multiply the number of years the animal has been alive by 7. That would make Lucy 91.

But according to a 2020 study conducted at the University of California, San Diego, the multiply-by-7 rule oversimplifies things. By analyzing changes in dogs’ DNA methylation patterns—or, to put it in layman’s terms, by getting all sciencey and shit—researchers found that dogs age rapidly in their first couple years, but then cool it, maturation-wise, later on.

“A 1-year-old dog is like a 31-year-old human; a 3-year-old dog is like a 49-year-old human; a 7-year-old dog is like a 62-year-old human,” explains a summary in the Brighter Side of News that I found easier to read than the scientific paper.

The upshot is that you’ll get a more accurate idea of your dog’s age in human years by using this equation:

16ln(dog age) + 31

So on a scientific calculator, press the “ln” button for the natural logarithm function, then enter your dog’s age and hit the equal sign. Multiply that number by 16, add 31, and presto, there’s your dog’s age in human years.

By that formula, Lucy is a spry and with-it 72—the same age as Dr. Jill Biden, Tony Danza, and Charo, each of whom seems perfectly healthy to me.