I truly thought my time of getting up in the middle of the night, except for me to use the bathroom, was over. But our big girl, Millie, has other plans. Quite often now, I’ll hear her out in the hallway in the middle of the night and she lets out one bark. If that doesn’t work, she’ll bark again. I was taught the hard way that if she does this, I best get my butt out of bed and take her outside. The night I didn’t, I was fortunate not to step in the huge pile of stinking dog doo-doo she’d left in the middle of my bedroom floor.

The Great Hunter goes to bed before I do, and because he is Millie’s favorite human, she goes to bed with him…on the bed. We keep a cover on the bed so that we are not directly sleeping under dog hair, and it’s also supposed to be waterproof. Guess what? It’s not. More times than I wish to count, I’d get ready to crawl into bed, after I’d shushed her off the bed, only to find a large spot wet spot soaked through the cover, the quilt, the sheet and onto the bottom sheet and mattress cover. Needless to say, I’d have to find another place to sleep. I originally blamed it on her excessive drooling.

Several months ago, I noticed that when she would lie by the front door and get up, there would be a small puddle where she had been lying, and occasionally, I would see drip spots throughout the house. Those spots are not to be confused with the slobber drips around the water bowl and whatever direction they walked away in. I began to suspect the wet spot in the bed wasn’t caused by drooling so I decided to make an appointment with the Vet.

After testing her urine and finding nothing wrong (except for a little dirt I got in there when I tried to scoop up her pee), the veterinarian diagnosed her with Spay-Induced Incontinence.  I’ve never encountered this before and I’ve been owned by dogs for fifty years (as opposed to owning a dog, that, we know, is just a fallacy). All have been spayed females except for two lone males, neither of which I set out to get; one inherited from my son and one found injured on the roadside.

What is Spay-Induced Incontinence? I’m glad you asked, because I had to look it up too. According to Oklahoma State University:

Urethral sphincter mechanism incompetence, or USMI for short, is the typical form of incontinence in dogs. This disorder is often referred to as “spay incontinence” because it appears in female dogs after they have been spayed. The cause of incontinence in these patients is most likely related to decreased estrogen levels associated with removing the ovaries during the spay.

With USMI, many patients begin to leak small amounts of urine in their sleep. You may notice a small amount of urine on their bedding or where they were laying after they wake up. For some dogs, this can progress to a point where they have difficulty holding their urine even when awake.
It’s estimated that between 5 percent and 20 percent of spayed dogs develop USMI and urine leakage. The larger the dog, the more likely it is to develop incontinence. In fact, dogs that weigh 45 pounds or more have been reported to have an incontinence incidence of 12 percent to 31 percent. (Shane Lyon, DVM, MS, DACVIM (SAIM), an associate professor of small animal internal medicine at Oklahoma State University College of Veterinary Medicine’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital.)

So now Millie is on pills for incontinence (probably for the rest of her life), and since I personally know what it’s like to have to get up to the bathroom in the middle of the night, when she lets me know she needs to go out, I’ll take her.

The Great Hunter, of course, sleeps through it all.