It's the kind of heart-palpitating excitement we really do not need. Button, our elderly black miniature poodle with her failing eyesight and flagging awareness and memory, becoming increasingly less aware of her spatial limitations. Bad enough she seems to forget where she is so often, and finds herself 'trapped' when she's in a corner and suddenly cannot figure out she could turn around and just remove herself from the dilemma.

Worse, when she's in her preferred resting places, always elevated from the floor, and forgets that if she scrubs around too vigorously to settle down and comes too close to the edge of the sofa seat she will slide off. Sliding off isn't too bad, since it's not a deep fall, but sliding off awkwardly and hitting her head on the sharp corners of a large, carved-edge coffee table could induce some harm which we'd far prefer to avoid.

For all of her 18-1/2 years she has been able to gracefully, effortlessly, leap up on a sofa in the living room, or on the loveseat in our bedroom, and there comfortably settle herself down for an afternoon nap or a night's restful sleep. For the past year or so her eyesight has become increasingly compromised, to match her hearing loss which began much earlier. And in the past few months she no longer makes that leap, depending upon us to lift her onto her preferred sleeping surface.

We've become accustomed to her becoming engrossed in scrubbing about her 'nest', making it just so before she settles in for her nap. We've become accustomed to her occasionally slipping off the edge of the sofa as she forgets the width available to her. Occasionally we hear her head clunk slightly. This morning it was more like a concussion, and bleeding ensued. We thought the bleeding emanated from a cyst that grows and ebbs above her left eye but couldn't be certain, though we washed it with a cool wet washcloth.

She was taken for an emergency visit with our veterinarian, who cleaned her up further, as she was bleeding fairly profusely, assured us it was indeed that recurring cyst that had broken, and that she was fine, nothing amiss. On return back home we hauled that heavy, carved coffee table much further out from the sofa, and lifted the rug beside the sofa to line it more heavily with impact-softening layers of foam.