A month after her 19th birthday our miniature Poodle-Pomeranian-mix, Button, is back on a week of her monthly-protocol of oral antibiotic. Her veterinarian recommended this to us two years ago, to ensure that she no longer becomes so dreadfully ill as she used to, when a massive infection would set in, causing us to feel we were going to lose her.

Her heart and lungs and other vital organs are all in good shape, but for a heart murmur, and she is still energetic enough to have her daily ravine walks, although because she is now blind and deaf she must be carefully and firmly guided at close range. She stops on the trail and begins to walk in tight circles from time to time, so we have to wait until she stops circling and is prepared to walk a straight line along the pathways with guidance controlling her through her harness and lead, so she does not veer off, as she often wants to do, into the woods, off the trails.

When the temperature dips below minus-6-degrees Celsius, she has to be booted, otherwise the frigid temperature ices up her little paws. And she wears a winter coat out in the ravine, a lighter sweater to keep her warm in the house, during the day. She looks unkempt, because her hair continues to grow at an amazing rate. Since I cut it with scissors when I can manage to get her still for a few minutes, she no longer looks well groomed; she tries to avoid being fussed over.

At least she is now accustomed to being without sight, no longer thumping her head so mercilessly against objects she cannot see. She has learned to negotiate her way around the first floor of the house; we carry her upstairs to the second floor at night, to sleep in our bedroom. We have had to block off access to the stairs; it's just like having a toddler around the house again; she has, in the past, fallen down the stairs and we want to avoid that re-occurring.

When it's time to eat, she no longer waits expectantly in the kitchen to be served, but has to be picked up and placed directly over her food bowl before a whiff of her food is recognized by her faltering sense of smell, and she begins to eat. Amazingly, her appetite has improved as she grows older. And now that she is so old we no longer worry about giving her treats like bits of bacon or sausage. And she loves her daily salads, a mixture of cooked corn, peas, beans, carrots, topped up with fresh red bell pepper and snow peas.

She sleeps away much of the day, just as she sleeps soundly throughout the night. Her daily ravine walk takes up roughly an hour and a half of the day, otherwise she paces around the first floor of the house restlessly, for hours at a time. If she has been sleeping up on the sofa in the corner that is her favourite daytime sleeping place, once five o'clock arrives, she wakes as though an inner alarm clock has roused her.

And then she begins her restless pacing until her evening meal is served an hour later. We do our best to gauge the right time to take her out to the backyard to urinate and evacuate, and mostly we're in luck, but sometimes not quite. She will go for hours throughout the day without urinating, and we realize she forgets to drink water, so we have got into the habit of picking up her water bowl and placing her directly over it, muzzle touching the water, to remind her to drink - and she does, copiously.

Once in a while, on a rare occasion, it is as though she thinks she is once again a puppy and suddenly, amazingly, begins to caper at a dazzling speed, just as she used to when she was a youngster, all those years ago.