Reply to What is the hardest decision you've ever made?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Putting my elderly dog down instead of spending the $3,000 on an emergency surgery that *might* have saved him.  At the time, I felt like if I really loved him I should pay for the surgery, damn the cost.  However, I couldn't justify the money given that it wasn't that likely to work and that we'd already paid several thousand over the preceding months on vet care that didn't help him.  Now I realize I made the right call by letting him go, even if it was for money reasons at the time.  [/quote]

+100.  The hardest decision we ever had to make was putting our dog to sleep. [/quote]

I'm an animal person, and I've had to make that decision a few times.  I think, though, that it isn't that that decision is hard in the sense of it's difficult to decide which will lead to the best outcome.  It's that that decision is painful, as in you know it's the best and appropriate thing to do (as in things aren't going to get better), but it's extremely gutwrenching to actually do it.

There is a big difference between painful decisions and hard decisions.  I consider the hard decisions the ones where it really wasn't obvious which option was the best, as in it was hard figuring out which choice made more sense (perhaps because they both made equal sense).

Those decisions are the ones that lead to more potential for regret.  I have had to put to sleep a few dogs, but I don't regret doing it because they were suffering, there was little hope that the suffering would be alleviated by any means, and even if some expensive treatment helped a little, it would really be just very temporary.  Those were sad times, but not difficult decisions.

The most difficult decisions had to do with relationships, marriage, and whether or not to have children because in all of those decisions, it's just so difficult to predict the outcome because it involves another person and their choices.

Don't get me wrong.  I loved my dogs (and cats).   But the most painful thing about putting them down wasn't that I didn't know what to do; it was realizing that they don't live as long as I'd like them to live and there really wasn't anything I could do to change that.  I'd say those decisions were painful because they weren't really decisions; they were acknowledging reality.

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