Latest / Senior Pet Talk | for dogs + cats / 17. The 10-Minute Monthly Checkup That Could Add Years to Your Pet's Life

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17. The 10-Minute Monthly Checkup That Could Add Years to Your Pet's Life · Senior Pet Talk | for dogs + cats

• Amanda Steffen: You are listening to Senior Pet Talk, the show where we combine Western and Chinese medicine to give senior dog and cat parents the knowledge, the clarity, and the confidence to make sure that your pets' senior years are their best years yet. I'm Dr. Amanda Stefan. Let's get started. Hello, senior pet parent, and thank you for tuning in to another episode of Senior Pet Talk, where we go through everything to help you become a more confident and prepared senior pet parent. Because I truly believe that the more that you know, the less scary that this part of their life is going to be. I am Dr. Amanda Stefan. And if you are listening in today, you have listened to a couple episodes and you really love the podcast, I would really appreciate. If you could rate and review the podcast so that we can get this out to more people. Everything I give you is free. I'm actually giving you an extra special free treat today. I just ask for some feedback so that I can know what we want to do in the future, what would help you the most. I'm literally just here to help you and to help your pet. So tell me what you need. Tell me what you like, what you don't like, and how I can help you and help your pet. Okay. Okay. Thank you for being here with me today. If you are watching this on Spotify or on YouTube, I am here with my sweet senior dog Mabel today. My other dog is off of the camera right now, so he may come back in. So I want to talk to you about a quick 10-minute checkup once a month that you can do that can give you more years of time with your pet. I am not exaggerating when I say that. This simple thing can help you catch so many problems early and can truly help you be able to give your pet a longer, happier, healthier life. Okay. The best thing about this, guys, if you have not already signed up for my email list, this is one of the first five free things that I just give to you once you sign up. And then once a week I send out emails that talk to you about updates in senior pet care, what things I'm learning about, what things have changed, and just little tidbits of information to help you with your senior pet. Okay. So if you have not already signed up, you can go to the link in my bio or to we'll try to link it below as well. Just go there, put in your name and your email, and it will send straight to your inbox. Okay. So you can have that and you can follow along with me today. All right. I have called this the Age and Gracefully checklist. This has progressed a little bit from two pages to like six or eight pages. And it may seem a little daunting, but if you just take the time to go through this with me today and I will explain everything to you, it can be so beneficial for your senior dog or cat to be able to catch these triggers and be able to bring these things to your family vet. So You can get it, you can print it out, you can make copies, you can laminate it. So you can just change things each month, whatever you want to do. But 10 minutes once a month, I promise you this will help your pet. Okay. So we're gonna talk through everything that's in this checklist that I have. And I am going to go play by play so you can do this on your own at home. Start this today. This is your action step. Go do this. And see how much more confident and comfortable you feel. If you need to ask more questions, you can always ask that at your next pet visit or reach out to me in my direct messages. Okay. So the reason that I wanted to go through this is because a lot of times things will start to happen in our senior pets. And we think that it has been just very suddenly this thing happened. Right. And then in reality, if we were to look back, a lot of times if I ask more probing questions. Somebody will say, ⁓ yeah, well, I guess he was eating a little less the past few weeks. And maybe he was going to the bathroom more. Maybe they were frequenting the litter box more or less. So once we think about these things, we do see that maybe there were symptoms a little bit earlier that we just had not been able to pick up on yet. So that is the idea of this checklist, just for you to be able to catch these things a little bit earlier. Okay. So I have a story about a cat named Rusty. Rusty, I saw when I was in my low-income facility that I worked at and helped to establish. And he came to us for just routine care. He was a slightly older kitty, belonged to this wonderful old lady. And he was doing great. His blood work looked great. Everything was fantastic. A month later, Rusty came back and his mom said, He is vomiting. He is peeing everywhere. I don't know what's going on, but he is not okay. And we said, okay, recheck some blood work because it has been a month, but blood work is a snapshot in time, right? So we don't always know it could change. So we checked Rusty's blood work and his glucose level was 400. So in that month, Rusty had become a diabetic. So that being said, things can change very quickly. Thankfully, this pet parent was very diligent. She checked in on things and she didn't just say, Well, I was just at the vet and they said everything was fine. She proactively came back in and talked with me. And that was extremely important in being able to treat and help her pet. I ⁓ Rusty was a bit of an interesting case because mom did not know that she could not pull up insulin early and then leave it in the syringes because it actually attaches, it binds to plastic. So She actually started by accidentally giving him 10 times the dose that he was supposed to get. But because she had her daughter come over and pull up the syringes ahead of time, it wasn't really working. So we got lucky. But it is also imperative to make sure that you're having the appropriate conversations with people. One unit is definitely not 10 units. And that was something that we all learned from was to be able to make sure that we grab a syringe, show them where to pull it up to. Her daughter was a nurse, but It just doesn't always play across. So he actually did really well. She had that happen because she had arthritis in her hand and she couldn't pull up the syringes. And she just felt bad telling me that initially. And I was like, look, this is not a big deal. I can call in a click pin to Walmart or to a pharmacy. And you can just get this little pin that you click a dial and it administers that one unit every 12 to 24 hours. And we're golden. Like that's amazing. So also as a pet parent, don't be afraid to ask. Don't be afraid to ask if something can be compounded into a tasty formulation if your pet's going to be on something long term. This is especially important in cats, right? I want to make sure that you have a positive interaction with your pet. So if we need to compound this and put it into something else, we can, you know, if there's any way I can make this easier for you. I want to know because that is my whole goal. The ability of you to take really good care of your pet depends on my ability to explain things appropriately to you and our ability to have good conversation so we can find out what's gonna work best for everybody, right? I think that's extremely important. So let's get down to it. Weighing. Weighing your pet, getting a weight on your pet monthly. Can be one of the most silent symptoms of a problem, especially cats. This is also something in dogs, but very important in our cat patients. So if we have a 10-pound cat and that 10-pound cat loses one pound, it's one pound, right? No, that is 10% of their body weight, which can be a huge thing. That can mean severe muscle wasting, that can mean heart disease, that can mean kidney disease. That can mean thyroid disease. That can mean so many different things. So making sure that we are checking their weight is something that is very important. This is also important for dogs. I think one of the single most important things that you can do is to get a scale. If you have a dog, like a slightly bigger dog or something, you can always get like a human scale and then weigh yourself and then weigh yourself holding your dog. Or you can always go to the vet clinic and just get a weight on them or pet store, pet smarts, things like that typically have like a weight scale somewhere where you can just quickly get a weight on them and kind of know where they're at once a month, right? So take your monthly pet store trip and take them to go get a sweet snack and maybe a pup cup or something and get their weight. And then you can write that down. For cats, I think one of the most important things is to have a baby scale. Baby scales can be very inexpensive. People tend to have babies and then their babies grow up and they don't fit on baby scales anymore. So then they give them away on marketplace or they resell them or they take them to the secondhand store. I am a huge thrifter, a huge advocate for lowering my carbon footprint. So I secondhand clothes, beds, dog equipment, things like that, everything I think is safe to secondhand. I love thrifting. So getting a baby scale and weighing them once a month can be really important for cats. It's a little harder to do the subtraction method with cats because you can still be like there's more variancy that can happen there. So a baby scale is very important. Can be $10, and that $10 could be the difference between your cat living to 13 and your cat living to 16. Okay. And I know how important that is to you. So get a baby scale. Very simple. Okay. So The other way that we can kind of get a better idea of are they having any muscle loss? Are they having any weight loss, things like that, is what we call the rib feel test. So essentially with our pets, we want to be able to feel their ribs without pushing too hard. We should be able to kind of run our hands down their side and feel their ribs, not specifically be able to see them very prominently from a distance, but we want to be able to feel them without having to press. Down really hard on like fat or something between it. This is pretty, pretty specific for cats. That's a easy way to know. However, for dogs, this can vary based on the breed. So, you know, a mastiff is always gonna look different than a greyhound. There are some breed variations to take into account for that, right? But the rib test can be an easy way for us to tell too. And if we're checking between months, then we may notice a difference with it. It's a lot of times it's just about you getting comfortable with what things feel like at that time, right? Okay. Are they starting to have changes in their appetite or their eating habits? Are they starting to drop food? Are they starting to have trouble chewing? If you have not heard the story of my dog Molly, she was about 15 or 16 years old when she loves food, loved food. Always ate her food very quickly. She started to chew her food a little funny. And then she tr started to drop food. And then she would actually start to like walk over to the food bowl and then sometimes walk away and take longer to eat. And I was like, well, this isn't right. So I just thought, you know, she probably has a bad tooth or something. She had just had a dental cleaning a year prior. So I took her in. We did a dental cleaning. And on that dental cleaning, they pulled her tongue out and noticed she had a very large tumor on a large portion of her tongue. That was really difficult as a pet parent who thought that she missed something. And now I know I have to give myself grace and know that I did everything leading up to that the way I should have. I just sometimes these things grow really fast. We don't know. There's no way to tell. I when she was Awake and alert, you could not see the tumor on her tongue. It was towards the back side of her mouth. So it was not something you would be able to see. She was also a chow mix. So she had a black tongue. So seeing a black tumor on a black tongue, you just weren't gonna do it. So also give yourself some grace. But if they do start to have appetite changes, or they're like chewing their food funny, or they're turning their head funny, or their cats like hiss at the food and walk away, or they favor the canned food, any of those things could be. Dental disease, it could be oral pain, it could be other, you know, ⁓ oral diseases or things like that, could also be things like nausea or early kidney disease or other things of that nature. So definitely something that you want to watch, you know, just once a month watch them eat their food and make sure they look okay and notice trends, as I said in a previous episode, notice trends are very important. So are they only finishing half of their food? The past two weeks, that's a trend. That's a big deal that we need to keep a very close eye on, right? Are they having changes in their drinking habits? So are we drinking more? Are we drinking less? Are we peeing more? Are we peeing less? This is especially important for cats. Dogs can also get diabetes. I just feel like we see it more in our older cats. And then thyroid disease can also cause this too. And kidney disease. So there can be a multitude of diseases that can cause these symptoms. Could also just be like a UTI or something like that. So it's important to notice these trends and these changes that happen over time and bring those to your vet so that we can get them evaluated and figure out what is the cause of it. Because cats and dogs that find kidney disease early in that like stage one, stage two. typically have a lifespan that is going to be years longer than patients who we do not find until they're stage three. So it's really important to make sure that we we know those things. Are we having any changes in our GI signs, right? So is there vomiting that's happening? Is there diarrhea that's happening? Are stools actually much harder and we're getting constipated? Is there things that are going on there that are not normal? Simply just having some loose stools and a decreased appetite and an episode or two of vomiting could be a sign of something like hemandrous arcoma, which is a very quickly growing invasive abdominal tumor that can happen in dogs and can become an emergency extremely fast, right? So it is important to make sure that we're keeping an eye on these things and noting them and writing them down somewhere, and then taking those to our family bed. So if we're having A lot of vomiting that usually warrants going to an emergency room or energic care or getting into your vet as soon as possible. If we're having changes to our stool. So maybe we used to have brown normal poops, and now we're having more black poops. That could mean actually some digested blood is found in that poop, and that could be a concern. I'm going to tell you something very weird about veterinarians and veterinarian medicine. We love to look at pictures of poops. It is just something where we can gain so much knowledge from how poop looks and then also the frequency and amount of poop at one time. Are we having like small frequent poops? Are we having like large puddles once a day? That all to helps us differentiate is this large intestine? Is this small intestine? Where is the problem? What are we doing? Right. So do not be offended by taking a picture of poop and sending it to your vet. I promise you, they see it all the time. They're probably going to be eating their lunch while they look at it and respond to you and will not care. We are just a special type of breed. So those things are really important to keep an eye on and keep an eye on trends. Like one off. Of a change of stool and then it goes back to normal may just have been something that they maybe a new treat or maybe something like that. But consistent changes are definitely something to look out for. Cats tend to get things like inflammatory bowel disease or GI lymphoma in that like middle age to older range, right? So we may have a cat who has never had GSNs before and now they're starting to have vomiting two to three times a week. And now they're starting to have looser stools and things like that. So That's very important because if we get on top of that again early and treat it, often we can get that better with just a diet change as opposed to having to go to like steroid therapy and something stronger, right? Litter box changes in casts is one of the things that I think is paramount to keep an eye on. Are we having four to six peas a day and like one to two poops a day? Or are we having now we're seeing 10 spots of pee a day that we're cleaning out and we're seeing no poop for like three or four days at a time? What changes are happening is very important. Are we starting to poop outside of the litter box? Are we starting to pee outside of the litter box? Are we starting to pee in the kitchen sink? And we didn't usually do that. What changes are happening? And those things can be indicative of a lot of different potential diseases. So It's very important for us to keep a close eye on those types of things. Okay. So cats are going to hide like GI and urinary changes a lot more than dogs. That's why we always recommend doing this like litter box monitoring. You can also monitor, you know, output with your dogs and your cats. If your dog is asking to go out five times a day now instead of just three. That is something to keep an eye on. And maybe go out with them and say, like, why? What are you doing out here? Are you peeing? Are you pooping? Are you just sniffing? What's going on? Are you did you find something new in the yard that you really want to play with? Maybe it's not a good idea. So, you know, keeping an eye on all those things. Okay. Then I want to talk about movement next. So I just saw a patient today. My he is a new client that I'm seeing. His name is Sully. And Sully has some. Changes to his back legs where he kind of splays out. And he does have a hard time getting up and downstairs, but it's more like he's scared to do it because he has fallen at some point. And in evaluating Sully today, I realized I don't think Sully has severe arthritis as the cause of what's going on with him. I fear that Sully might have slipped a disc in his back or might have some neurologic disease that's going on. So when we're differentiating between like neurologic disease and arthritis, we're looking at their patterns over the day. Are they improving as the day goes on and they move and they loosen up those joints? Or is it kind of the same all day long? So when we're looking for arthritis symptoms, we're looking more for like when they first wake up in the morning and they've been asleep all night, are they really stiff? Are they having a harder time? Are they doing more stretching? Are they just you know, not popping up like they normally do. Like you get up and normally they follow you everywhere. And now they're like, actually I'm just gonna stay here a little bit longer. Are they having a harder time getting up and down the stairs? Like are they looking at them a little bit longer now? Or are they not sure about if they want to do that or not? What changes are happening? We're having a hard time getting up off the floors now and we used to do okay with that. Another thing that I don't think people think about is not sitting. So I've had Quite a few patients now. And Sully is one of them. There they say, like, he doesn't sit. He just either is standing or laying. And that can be a symptom of like lumbosacral disease or hip disease or things like that, because it hurts to sit. So they are instead doing this just like, I'm gonna go all the way down. If I'm going down, I'm going down, or I'm coming up. And those are kind of my two options, right? So those are important things to keep an eye on as well. I think there's so much that can be said and seen from just simply a video or watching them move around. So if you don't know and you don't feel confident in your ability to differentiate these things, that's valid. You didn't go to school for eight years. I get it. Take a video. Just take a video of them walking once a month. And, you know, if you go to your vet every three to six months at that six month checkup, have them saved in an album and say, Hey, this is him walking. April, May, June, July, August, September. Can you just take a look at all of these and tell me if you feel like this is good or if there's anything you're concerned about? Because when they're in the vet clinic, they're not gonna be walking normally. There's a lot of other reasons and stress and anxiety and the floors suck and they're just not gonna be getting around the way that we anticipate that they're going to. So it is important to have those videos and things of when they're at home, right? Other things would be cat specific, like Cats are not going to show arthritis as much in those types of ways that I discussed previously. However, what you're typically going to see with a cat is like they used to love to jump up onto the counter and they just don't really jump up on the counter anymore. They used to just hop over the baby gate and now they don't do that anymore. They now maybe they jump onto a chair and then up onto the counter. So instead of jumping straight up onto this table beside me, they would jump onto my chair and then up onto the table beside me. That can be a sign that we are starting to have some discomfort. If they look down at the ground before they jump down and they really think about it, they're thinking real hard about whether that's worth that pain or not. That is a symptom. So those things are all things to keep in mind when it comes to cats. Another thing with cats is not grooming as much. So if they're starting to get matted fur along their back end or they're just looking more oily or dandruffy or unkempt. That has a lot of Chinese medicine information to it, but from a Western standpoint too, it can definitely just mean that they're not, they're having discomfort and they're not able to groom themselves appropriately anymore. Or they're having some oral pain and they're not able to groom themselves as well anymore. These are all important things to bring up. Okay. So checking the gums, speaking of dental and oral stuff, a gum check. can be extremely helpful. This can be helpful in like scary situations, like they're panting a lot or they have collapsed or something like that. But also just in general, it's good to have a color check on them and know what their normal is. If you have a dog with pigmentation, like my dog Molly, it can be really hard to evaluate their gums because they're just black, right? And that's hard. Sometimes you can more just look like in the whites of the eye or along the nose or the inside of the ears or things like that for this. And you're mostly at that point just looking for like, is it nice and white and there's no like yellow discoloration or anything scary like that. For the gums, what we're checking is we want ideally for our gums and our tongue to be this like pretty bubblegummy pink color, right? What we don't want is for us to lift up their lip and see that it is purple or that it is yellow or that it is pale, like more of a piece of paper color, right? Those are all signs that I'm concerned about, you know, their organs. I'm concerned about if they're getting enough red blood cells where they need to go, if they're getting enough oxygen, those types of things. So that's really important to notice. I worked an emergency shift last night. So a lot of this is fresh in my brain. I had a patient that came in to me yesterday and he came in because his owner said his tongue was purple. And that's not normal for him. He had laryngeal paralysis. He was having a hard time breathing. And he was not able to get that fixed on his own. So we did have to intubate and help him. So in these scenarios, it can be something that can help us to get some good information. So maybe we always notice that his gums are always just like pretty pink color. And now they're kind of like a pale pink color. They're pink, but they're they're look a little lighter. And it seems concerning to me. That can be an early sign of some changes and diseases and would be important to keep up with, right? The other thing that we're looking for in the mouth is the dental disease. So 80% of pets over the age of three have dental disease. If they're not getting routine dental care, which most unfortunately are not, then this will happen. So what we're looking for when we look at the teeth is we're looking for that plaque buildup. So we're looking for those like what looks like you could chip off plaque pieces or color change, especially around that gum line. We're looking for any like pulp exposure. So if we see red on the end of a tooth, like at the bottom part of a tooth, or we see like black on the end of a tooth and the tooth looks worn down, that is telling us that there's exposed nerve root there. And that could create infections. It could cause other problems. So it's really important to keep an eye on that. The other thing with dental tartar to look at is the gums. So where the tooth touches the gum. itself. It's important to look there and see is there swelling along the gum? Is it red and inflamed? Is it, you know, having any oozing or discharge or anything scary like that coming from that area? If we're noticing like some swelling over the gums, that could very well be dental disease that's happening underneath the tooth that we can't see. A tooth is like an iceberg. You see a third of it, the two thirds of it is underneath that that gum line. So there's a lot more tooth under there that has the potential to get disease to it. So it's important for us to be checking those types of things. Okay. Have you ever left the vet with more questions than answers? And then you drive home and you go straight on to Google. Yeah, I hear that a lot. And honestly, it's exactly why I created my senior pet virtual consultations. Imagine we have 45 minutes where we go through everything, your pet's full history, their specific challenges, their daily life, no rushing. We're gonna cover nutrition, integrative options, whole modifications, and quality of life. And I send you a personalized plan after so that nothing slips through the cracks here. But don't just take my word for it. Chelsea called it a senior pup therapy session and said she felt so much better afterwards. Adiba got recommendations her own vet had never thought to suggest, and Denise said that the consult was incredibly informative and helpful, giving her many options to help her dog Loki feel better. This is the conversation that your senior pet deserves. And honestly, The one you deserve to. The link is in the description. I'd love to help you. All right, bad breath is not normal. Okay. So if we're noticing bad breath, that's an important reason for us to get that checked up. Molly had really bad breath when her tumor in her mouth kind of opened and we did some pulse antibiotic therapy on her to help with it because she was having a lot of foul odor and definitely some discomfort from that. So it is important to keep an eye on those things. Okay. Eyes, ears, and nose. So we have talked previously about a normal cloudiness to the eyes. That is a progressive aging change. It should not look like one day you wake up and it looks bright white in their eye. That's different. You should not be squinting. It should not seem painful. Any of those things would not be normal. But like a progressive over years, like white gray haze to the eye can be normal. Always ask your vet about that. Cause it can look one way to you and another way to your vet. So always ask about those types of things, right? Okay. Ears. Are we shaking our head? Are we having some discharge? Are we noticing problems? I do think it's important, especially for cats, as they get older to clean their ears out once a month or so, because they're not able to get down there and clean them as well as they had previously. So they can get some buildup that happens. Okay. So for their skin, we want to check like, are we starting to get dandruff? Are we getting like, some oiliness to the skin? Are we getting some areas of hair loss? Are we looking like we have dry brutal hair, fur, those types of things? Are we starting to get lumps and bumps and spots on our body? A very nice thing to be able to do is just to do like a body like petting massage where we're just running our hands from their head to their back end and we're just feeling around for any like masses, swellings, things like that that would be concerning, right? And we want to take those things into account and see what size they are. Ideally, if you can try and grab these little bumps and move them around, are they hard? Are they soft? Are they able, are you able to like kind of move them around very easily? Are they very like stuck to the underlying layer? You know, are we noticing over time that it's getting bigger, that it's altering and opening up? All those types of things can be really important for telling us whether something is more scary and cancerous. Or whether we are just having some like benign aging changes, like skin warts and skin tags and things like that that can happen. Another thing would be looking at our nails, which can give us a lot of detail. Cats with thyroid disease have these very specific long, like breakable nails. So that is something to look out for with dogs. Sometimes they like chew on their nails if they have allergies or may have some other problems. They can also get fungal infections in their nails. So making sure everything looks the normal color, there's no redness, everything looks comfortable and happy, right? Another thing that I have on my checklist and may seem a little advanced. So I encourage you to ask your family that to show you when you go in for your next visit about this is a lymph node check. So there are lymph nodes under the chin, there's lymph nodes kind of in the armpits, there's lymph nodes in the groin area. And there are lymph nodes on the back of the kneecaps, like the back side of the leg. And all of these different lymph nodes can help give us some information about are they having an infection they're trying to clear? Are they having some sort of reactive issue that they're trying to get rid of? What can we do to help them? So I did locate them on a page on this. Same for dogs and cats. But there are like a salivary gland under the neck as well that sometimes people can get confused if it's a salivary gland versus a lymph node, all those types of things. So don't want you to scare yourself with a lymph node check. But I do maybe next time you're at the vets, watch a video or two about it or just ask them, hey, can you show me where their lymph nodes are that I can palpate? You can typically feel the ones under the neck and the ones behind the kneecaps, but other than that, sometimes you can't really feel the lymph nodes if they're normal. Okay. So don't be alarmed by that. The next thing that I want to talk to you about is watching their breathing. So a respiratory rate can give us a lot of information about pain, about heart disease, about other things that could be going on with them, lung disease, ⁓ are they having like fluid buildup? Is their heart having a harder time? Anything like that. Okay. So this is something you want to do while they're sleeping. So if you're watching right now, Mabel is the perfect candidate for this. She has her eyes closed. She's been resting for a little period of time. And basically I'm going to look at her. I'm going to get a stopwatch and I'm going to set it for 60 seconds. And while that 60 seconds is going, has a little timer on it. I'm going to watch how she takes a breath in and she takes a breath out. And every time her chest rises and falls, it should be nice big breaths, right? Should not be shallow breathing. When she takes these big deep breaths, I will count, I'll say one. Two, three. And then we want that number to ideally be 30 or less when they're resting. If they've just been running outside, it's hot, there's other things going on, that's not gonna be the case. You're in the vet clinic, they're stressed out, whatever. This needs to be at rest, hanging out at home in a comfortable environment. That is something once a month, you check that, you're gonna pick up on some really big things way before other people will. Okay. So if that rate is consistently above 30, there is really good data to support that it is congruent with lung or heart damage or potentially severe pain. So something that I don't know that I've ever very rarely have I had someone bring it up to me in that visits or like routine care. Usually it's like, hey, they're breathing really bad and that's why I'm in here. But A lot of times people will say, especially with cats, like we just noticed this yesterday. He's been breathing at 60 breaths per minute just for 24 hours. And that's probably true. But the week before that, maybe he was breathing at 40 or 50 breaths per minute and we didn't pick up on that. So if you're doing this home check again, you're catching things early. You're the A plus student. Okay. And this can also help us catch heart disease earlier, catch other concerns. And then be able to treat those things earlier and give us more life on the other side of it. I'm just gonna keep saying it. The earlier we catch things, the longer we have to treat it. Okay. And the more in life we're probably gonna get out of that, right? All right. Again, with breathing difficulties, we're looking at like is their tongue turning purple? Are they starting to have a harder time catching their breath? And those types of things can also be something to keep in mind with it. Okay. And then we're talking about cognitive changes. I just had this conversation again with someone last night who said, well, now he's like sleeping under the bed, which is weird for him, and maybe getting lost in the corners. And those weren't things that he did before. And this patient says, I'm not eating well. So we do kind of try to rule out right now, is this dementia or does he potentially have a brain tumor? But these are important things to catch early because dementia does not have a cure right now. So being able to help dementia. in those earlier stages is going to prevent the progression of it a lot better. And I apologize if you can hear my dog snoring, but she's having a really good nap. So we're looking for like, are they getting lost in weird places? ⁓ are they staring at walls? Are they seeming to space out? Do they not recognize you or family members anymore? Are they seeming more anxious and they're not comfortable with new situations like they used to be? Are they starting to wander at night and pace the house? Cats like wandering around yowling, that type of stuff. Okay, guys. So that is most of what I have for you today. If you do not already have the checklist, please go to my social media and go to freebies, ⁓ the link in my bio, or I will try to link this below and you can click on it there and put your information. I will send this checklist to you for free on day one. There's some information about my story and Floyd's story and why I'm here in front of you today. And then the subsequent five days, you're going to continue to get an email with an amazing free giveaway inside of that. Okay. And then once a week, I'm going to give you some more insight for free every week, just for being extra special and a part of my world. Okay. I am here for you. I am here for Floyd. I am here for Molly. I am here for all the dogs that. I have now all the cats that I had growing up and that have since passed. And, you know, just being able to help people is really what the goal of this entire thing is. So if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. Again, if you can give us a rating and a review, I would really appreciate that. If you feel like somebody you know could benefit from this, you can send them the link to the checklist or you can send them this. video and hopefully it'll help give you some insight. I know that you are doing a fantastic job. I truly believe that you are doing the best that you can. I do not believe in coincidences. I believe that your pet is yours for a reason to teach you something or for you to be able to learn from them in some other way or, you know, to affect your life in one way or another. And I think that they are still here with us after they pass. I know I feel flooded frequently and You're doing a fantastic job. Okay. So if there's ever anything I can help you with, please feel free to reach out. Have a beautiful day with your senior pet. And thank you for joining me today. Thank you for giving me your time. I appreciate that. That's it for today. If this episode helped you, please leave a review or rate this podcast so we can get the word out to more pet parents who need to hear that they are doing a good job. And if you're interested in working more with me, you can find me on social media or at senior petconnection.com because we all need to stay connected. Remember that you are doing a great job with the information that you have in this moment. And I am just here to give you more of it. See you next week.