How Cosequin Gave Maple Her Mornings Back

Maple is twelve. She came home with us as a puppy in the spring of 2014, and for most of those years she was at the back door before I had my slippers on. Last winter that changed. I would hear her start across the hall floor, stop, and try again, and the second try came with a small huff I had never heard from her.

She is a yellow Labrador mix, seventy four pounds, spayed, and spoiled in the ordinary way. In February, Dr. Amari watched her walk, felt along both hips, and had me turn her in a tight circle. Then she told me what I had been afraid of. Arthritis in both hips and in the left elbow. She said it plainly, then said the part I have repeated to myself since. This is managed, not fixed.

I am not a veterinarian. I spent thirty years as a home health nurse, so I know a little about stiff joints in people and almost nothing about dogs. What I knew by February was that I wanted something daily and dull rather than dramatic, and that is how Cosequin from Nutramax Laboratories ended up on our kitchen counter, at Dr. Amari's suggestion, in the first week of March.

She gets a chewable tablet every morning with her breakfast, the amount the package directions give for her weight. She had never had a joint supplement before, so I had nothing to compare it to except the dog in front of me, and for the first few weeks I told myself I was imagining things.

Around the middle of April, about six weeks in, I noticed she was getting up on the first try. Not every day. Not all at once. But the second try with the huff had gone from the rule to the exception, and that was enough for me to keep the tablets on the counter.

The second try with the huff had gone from the rule to the exception.

I should be plain that it did not fix her, because it did not. In April, on the oak floor in the hall, her back legs went out from under her and she splayed flat like a dropped rug. She was not hurt. She got up, looked embarrassed the way dogs do, and went back to her water bowl. But that floor is slick as glass and I had been meaning to do something about it for a year.

That month we bought her a Bedsure bed, a rectangular bolster bed with a removable cover, and set it on the carpet on my side of the bedroom where the old flat department store bed had been. The old one went to the curb. The cover comes off and goes in the wash every couple of weeks, which matters more than I expected. In May I measured her paw at about 2.7 inches against the chart on the listing and ordered a four pack of DOK TigerToes socks. She wears them indoors during the day and they come off at bedtime. They twist and I straighten them. That is the whole of it.

In June, a padded sling with handles for her rear end, the LOOBANI, for the days that needed it. Before it arrived I used a rolled bath towel under her belly for a few days, which works and is hard on the back. In August came a PetSafe Happy Ride ramp that folds and stands against the wall by the back door. It handles the three wooden steps down to the yard now, and it goes against the hatch of the Outback for vet visits so that Walt and I are not lifting seventy four pounds between us.

The order matters to me. Cosequin first, then the bed, then the socks, then the sling, then the ramp. Each one answered something the one before it could not. But the tablets from Nutramax Laboratories are the only one of the five that goes inside her, and they are the first thing I would buy again if I had to start over.

What I can tell you honestly is that the change is modest. She still has stiff days. Rain makes her slow and the steps take time. She is twelve with arthritis in both hips, and no chewable tablet is curing that. What changed is smaller and better. Most mornings she is up on the first try. She meets me at the door again.

I cannot tell you why one dog responds and another does not, or what the glucosamine hydrochloride and chondroitin sulfate are doing in her body, because I do not know. The label calls Cosequin a joint health supplement. A pain medicine is a different thing, and if your dog is limping or yelping or refusing to move, that is a conversation with your vet and not a shopping decision.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

Get the diagnosis first. Then give whatever you choose six weeks before you judge it, and write down what your dog's worst morning of the week looks like, in plain words, so that at the end of April you are not guessing whether anything changed. I did that on the back of an envelope and I am glad I did.

I would also tell you that a supplement is one piece and rarely the whole of it. The floor matters. The bed matters. How you lift them matters, and so does whether you lift them at all. Maple's mornings came back in pieces. Cosequin from Nutramax Laboratories was the first piece, and the one that stayed.