This site once contained a FAQ. The second question answered was "what's checkraise mean?" I don't get that question much anymore, thanks to the Travel Channel. What was the #1 most frequently asked question? It was, and remains, "How's Ed?"
I recognize it for what it is—polite small talk, something fluffy to say to engage me in conversation—but that doesn't make answering it any easier. My FAQ reply in 1999:
Ed's status has not changed in five years. She sleeps. She eats. She excretes. The seven-day forecast is for largely the same, broken up by intermittant squirrels. In the unlikely event that Ed's status ever changes, I will alert you.
Well, it's changed. My girl is nearly 11 now, and it shows. I'm having to lift her to her feet this week, so painful is a bulging disk in her spine. She screams in pain when trying to lift things off the ground. It's ugly. I'm administering steroids fours times a day in the hopes that the swelling will go down enough for her to be nominally ambulatory. This is not going to be a fun week. A visit to the vet this morning found me saying "Wait a second. You want me to take her off incontinence medication, put her on a steroid that will increase her thirst, and give her a muscle relaxant? Did I throw you down a flight of stairs in a previous life, or something?"