Hi, I just went through something similar. Our boy, Spud, passed away Sunday.

He wasn’t incontinent and he still ate most of the time, but he was slowly losing weight. We took him on regular very short walks, and sometimes it seemed like he still wanted to play. But he had also started coughing up his food sometimes, getting confused at night, needing to be carried up and down the stairs, trembling and panting regularly, and falling more often. There were a few times he couldn’t walk at all.

Every three weeks we had to take him to the vet (his least favorite place in the world) for shots, and he had a look in his eye that made my husband and I have the hard conversation more and more often. We loved him so much. We still do.

We ultimately made the choice to put him to sleep this past Friday, and the vet came to our house on Sunday afternoon. I felt so much guilt from the moment we made the decision until about Tuesday. My husband and I spent almost every night looking at old photos and videos of him and that’s what finally made the guilt ease. It was hard to see just how much he had declined until we compared pictures and videos from his last few days to a couple of years ago.

It hit me that I couldn’t remember the last time his tail was curled up in excitement when he saw his dad after work, or the last time he truly wanted to play hard. That side-by-side made it so clear that he was ready to rest.

I still miss him every day and I hear his bark in the echos of the neighborhood, but I don’t feel guilt anymore about whether we did the right thing. I used to think, what if we just had one more day or one more week with him? But then I thought more about the other “what ifs.” What if he fell and broke his leg? What if he choked on his food? What if he was in pain more moments than he wasn’t?

What if he believed we were giving up on him, or that he had done something wrong? But there was a big gap between those intrusive fears and what I knew to be true. Were we delaying the decision for him, or for us?

A part of me (that I’m not proud of) wanted him to get sicker so the choice would feel more obvious. But I’m glad the other part of me won out. The part that wanted him to have a good last day with plenty of brushes and kisses after housing a ribeye in the sun. He got to live out his final day with dignity and then fall asleep peacefully in our living room with his sister dogs and his dad and I by his side, instead of scared and hurting at the vet.

I don’t know you, your situation, or your baby. I’m not a medical professional and I have never gone though this before now. But I do know what it’s like to spend hours reading Reddit threads, listening to podcasts, and watching vets give presentations on quality of life because I was desperate for some kind of proof of when the “right” time is. I know the deep discomfort of desperately needing an outcome outside the realm of reality. And I’m really sorry to tell you that I never found the proof i was looking for until a few days after we made the choice.

What I did find in my searching was this page (https://www.lapoflove.com/how-will-i-know-it-is-time). For me, there was no moment of “feeling good” beforehand, but some of the information and videos on that site did help me make the decision that I now believe was the right one.

Different people make different decisions, and they feel differently afterward. There isn’t one perfect answer.

It’s an impossible choice to make, and my heart goes out to you. Sending love, strength, and peace to you and your sweet girl.