No More Weapon of Mass Destruction

Holly used to own a WMD, her tail.

It didn't just wag it thrashed from side to side, up and down and, when she was thoroughly over-excited, it would go round and round at a speed that made us all wonder when she was going to take-off like a helicopter.

She has wagged over more mugs of tea than I can remember, knocked over ornaments and vases (with and without flowers), knocked baubles off the Christmas tree, broken fragile stems on plants in the garden and it has caused her to leap up barking furiously because there was a banging on the door - silly dog, it was your tail wagging and thumping on the floor.

It's got her into a few scrapes as well. She wagged it into a fire and singed all the fur at the end, thankfully not down to the skin but the whole house and Holly smelt of burning hair for quite some time after. I also lost count of how many doors and walls with still slightly damp paint on them also gained a stripe of Holly fur where she got too close and wagged her tail into the wet paint. She also managed to somehow wag it into a bucket of wallpaper paste miraculously without knocking the whole bucket over.

From about the 1 year post diagnosis point I started to notice that the tail wagging wasn't quite as furious as it used to be. Over the next 12 months or so it continued to reduce and subside until now (I am writing this entry in December 2013) it mostly just hangs down. Every so often a bit of message will get through and there will be a gentle swish, but nothing that would endanger even a flimsy polystyrene cup of tea.

For me it's the little things that seem to be the hardest to accept. Realising that her tail would no longer wag and bash everything was incredibly sad, it was always an audible indicator of how she was feeling. Now I have to go look at her ears, eyebrows and eyes to tell.