When do you call it quits?

 So our beagle has blown out her hip about a million times but now she is ten years old and has a huge hump on her rear either from some sort of growth or walking differently because of the bad hip.  The doctor said she basically has torn everything in her hip from all the falls.  Now she is having issues getting up and standing on her legs for long and it looks like the time is coming to an end for her.  The thing is she seems happy and the hip only bothers her when she needs to move but how long do you wait to pull the plug?

 Then she is real good about resting it up and bouncing back after a few days of rest so at this time I am hoping it is just stiff and she needs to just let it be for a bit but she has never been this bad ever.  Now I play the waiting game and see if she does better or if it goes south and need to make those calls to get pricing and how you go about putting an animal down.  This will be my first to put down if she does not do what we would all love for her to do is drag a tarp into the backyard under the drummed red maple tree and lie on it and pass away in the middle of the night. 

Then there is the personal factor that well, um I kind of get really attached to my animals like they are my children and it is hard for me to let them go.  My wife says I cried more when my dalmatian that I had from fourteen to when my brother had to put her down and I was twenty five than when my 97 year old grandmother passed away.  I personally think I cried equally for both but who really knows.  Then our son left for California just when this started (she is his dog) and I told him she might be gone before he gets back and to say his final words to her.  To me that is the hardest part, to put his dog down while he is off on vacation.  My brother was watching my dalmatian for me when he had to put her down and I felt real bad because I was not there.  Well in the meantime it is a wait and see but until then I will hug her and rub the hump on her hip until the time comes.