Kelly Ripa Gets Emotional Over Elderly Dog’s Deteriorating Health: ‘Just Wish I Knew’ What to Do

“From one old girl to another, tell me what to do,” Ripa recalled asking her dog Chewie, 17, on ‘Live with Kelly and Mark’

Kelly Ripa is grappling with one of the most challenging dilemmas a dog owner will ever face: deciding when to say goodbye.

While discussing National Dress Up Your Pet Day during the Jan. 14 episode of Live with Kelly and Mark, co-hosts Ripa, 54, and Mark Consuelos, 53, opened up about their family’s two pups — and revealed that the eldest is “slowing down” in her old age.

After discussing their 4-year-old dog Lena — specifically, the fact that she “finds outwear humiliating,” per Ripa — the hosts turned their attention to their older dog, Chewie, and the conversation became a bit emotional.

 

“Let me just say this: we are at a stage in our lives with Chewie where Mark and I are now trying to decide …. Dogs can’t speak, and she’s at a stage in her life where she’s…,” Ripa explained, trailing off as Consuelos chimed in: “She’s slowing down.”

“She’s stopping doing almost everything,” Ripa said before revealing that the night before, the 17-year-old dog “had a huge, huge accident and then slipped in it and rolled around.”

This revelation led to a troubled groan from the Live with Kelly and Mark audience, prompting Ripa to tell the crowd, “I know — you weren’t there!”

“And so, this was like the real sign to me, so I took her to the tub to give her a bath,” Ripa recalled of the previous night. “And usually bathing Chewie is like bathing a dragon. This is a dog — even though, as an elder dog — she will fight you tooth and nail. And she just had her head down on the side of the sink.”

Combined with Chewie’s old age, this drastic difference in behavior led Ripa to question the best way to move forward; she explained: “I just … and I was looking at her like, ‘Tell me what to do. Tell me! Tell me!’ People are like, ‘No, you’ll know.’ But you don’t. Nobody knows. You don’t know.”

“But she’s almost 18 years old. She’s old. She’s really old,” Consuelos said, as Ripa reiterated that she “just wish I knew what to do.”

The longtime couple went on to explain that Chewie’s health has been deteriorating for a while, recalling an incident from “a couple of years ago” that Ripa said “was just the beginning of her not really knowing what is going on.”

“Anyway, I don’t know,” Ripa said about dealing with the pup’s ailing health. “If you have advice, maybe send it to our inbox. If you’re a veterinarian, I want to hear from you.”

After the hosts pondered a future segment exploring how to determine whether humane euthanasia is the next step for a pet, an emotional Ripa explained that she wishes Chewie could communicate with her directly.

“I wish she would, just this one time, say something,” the co-host said. “And I swear, I know she has this little benign tremor that she does, but the other night, I picked her up, and she locked eyes with me. And she hasn’t locked eyes with me in a really long time. And I said, ‘I know you. Do you know me?'”

“And I know it was the tremor,” Ripa continued, “but she looked at me” and nodded her head. “And I was like, ‘Wait, do you know me?’ And now I’m talking to this dog. I have full conversations with her now.”

The previous night, when Chewie had her accident, Ripa said she cradled the 17-year-old pup “like a baby.”

“I was just cradling her like a baby, and I was talking to her out loud,” she said. “I was like, ‘I just need you to tell me what to do, babe. From one old girl to another, tell me what to do.’ And she was just looking at me like, ‘Look, I’m a dog. I can’t. I’m the equivalent of 200 years old. What do you want from me?'”

“She’s a great dog,” Consuelos concluded of the family pet, and Ripa agreed: “She’s the best.”

Mark Consuelos reveals he once broke up with Kelly Ripa during ‘most agonizing week’ of his life

The “Live With Kelly & Mark” cohost told a wild story of how the pair’s breakup led to a marriage proposal.

Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos at the ‘Running With the Wolves’ premiere.

Key Points

• Mark Consuelos revealed that he once broke up with Kelly Ripa while they were on All My Children.
• The Live cohost said the breakup led to a marriage proposal, however.
• Consuelos called the time they spent apart “the most agonizing week of my life.”

Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos‘ three-decade love story nearly ended before it really began, the latter revealed in a new interview about the time he once broke up with his longtime spouse and eventual Live With Kelly & Mark cohost.

Consuelos told The Skinny Confidential podcast that, before the pair tied the knot in Las Vegas in 1996, the All My Children costars actually ended their relationship on rocky terms.

They “broke up the week before” they got married, the 54-year-old said on the show, though, at that point, they hadn’t yet made a plan to get married.

“I broke up with her, because I was dumb, and it was the most agonizing week of my life, and I just knew that I never wanted to feel like that. I’ve never felt like that in my life,” he continued, telling the story of how the breakup eventually led to his proposal.

Consuelos said that he broke up with Ripa because “she didn’t return any of my calls,” and then they had an awkward run-in on the set of Live With Regis and Kathie Lee — where they’d both end up working in the future.

“We were meant to do a bit of PR together. We were both on a soap, and ironically, we were both going to be presenting a winner, it was ‘Queen for a Day,’ a segment they did on Live With Regis and Kathie Lee. Her dream was to have her favorite soap stars roll out this sofa. She wanted a La-Z-Boy sofa. We were meant to roll that out and surprise her. We both tried to get out of it. I called the PR person, like, ‘I can’t,’ and she tried to get out of it as well.”

Consuelos said that they both wanted to avoid “seeing each other” on set, so they attempted to pull out of the engagement.

However, he said that his future wife’s attire that day enthralled him even more, and made him regret his decision to end the relationship days prior.

“She looked amazing. I can still see this little Chanel, beautiful jacket” accented “with a kerchief, like she’s French all of a sudden,” Consuelos remembered.

“I was like, oh man, she looks so good. Boy did I screw up. We do the segment, we barely speak to each other. I’m trying to speak to her, and we both smoked cigarettes back then,” the actor said. “She went out for a smoke break, I was like, ‘Do you mind if I go with you?’ She was like, ‘If you want.'”

Consuelos then followed her and “begged her to take a walk” through Central Park. He said they ended up at his apartment, where he proposed to her.

“I asked her to marry me,” he said. “She said, ‘Ask me when you’re serious,’ and I said, ‘I’m dead serious.’ I said, ‘We have a day off work tomorrow, let’s fly to Vegas and get married.'”

And, they did. In a 2024 episode of Live, the couple revisited the Las Vegas chapel where they were married in 1996.

“Some of those feelings came back as I drove up. I started getting sweaty,” Consuelos said at the top of the segment. “We were 25-year-olds. Our son is 26. It doesn’t make any sense. In a city where people roll the dice every day here, this is one of the safest bets I’ve made.”

Live With Kelly & Mark airs weekdays in syndication. Check your local listings for showtimes in your area. Watch Consuelos on the Skinny Confidential podcast above.

Kelly Ripa, 54, Reveals She Gained 12 Pounds After She Stopped Drinking Alcohol

“I expected there to be this windfall of weight loss.”

• Kelly Ripa opened up about gaining weight after quitting alcohol in 2017.
• She expected a “windfall of weight loss,” but actually gained 12 pounds after she began eating more sugar.
• Kelly and husband Mark Consuelos remain sober today.

Kelly Ripa, 54, has been sober for years. But now, she’s revealing that she actually gained weight after she stopped drinking alcohol in 2017.

On a January 22 episode of Live with Kelly and Mark, Kelly shared more details about her decision to quit drinking with Andy Cohen, who filled in for her usual co-host and husband, Mark Consuelos. It all started after Andy said that he’s avoiding alcohol this month for Dry January, and is surprised that he hasn’t lost weight over the past few weeks.

“Usually a little weight loss comes my way after,” he said, noting that it’s “not really happening yet.”

“I told you, when I quit drinking, I expected there to be this windfall of weight loss because everybody’s like, ‘Well, you are going to get too skinny, and you can’t afford to lose it,’” Kelly replied. “I gained 12 pounds [and said], ‘I don’t understand this magical weight loss that people apply.’”

But Kelly realized she gained weight because she’d started eating more sugar instead. “Apparently, alcohol is a lot of sugar, which you don’t really realize when it goes in it tastes kind of bitter,” she said.

Sugar cravings after quitting alcohol seem to be common. One small study of adults with alcohol use disorder found that cravings for sugar “significantly” jumped after people were treated for the condition. Another small study of adults who were hospitalized for alcohol use disorder noted that people started craving sweets soon after they stopped drinking.

In 2020, Kelly shared that she stopped drinking in 2017, around the time that Ryan Seacrest became her co-host. (He left the show in 2023.) While she didn’t reveal then why she stopped drinking, Ryan joked that he had something to do with it. “I started the show and she quit drinking. What does that tell you?” he said.

Kelly later shared that she stopped drinking along with her husband. “Not that we were sitting around drinking day and night, but I think that there is something about like clean living—maybe that’s what did it,” she told Parade. “Maybe that’s the difference.”

Kelly stopped drinking after doing a month of sobriety.

“I did a sober month—all my girlfriends did it, we all did it together—and I just never went back to it,” she told People. “It wasn’t even really a thought process. It felt great, I felt like I looked great, I felt like I didn’t feel hungover.”

Kelly also revealed that she “didn’t really feel the need or desire to go back to it. It wasn’t really a choice or a thought. It was just, ‘Yeah, I guess I don’t drink anymore.’”

Kelly Ripa Looks Stunning in Risqué Sheer Lace Top as She Steps Out with Mark Consuelos

The couple celebrated their producer Michael Gelman’s induction into the Broadcasting + Cable Hall Of Fame

Kelly Ripa made a bold fashion choice for her date night with husband Mark Consuelos.

On Tuesday, Sept. 30, the couple attended the Broadcasting + Cable Hall Of Fame Awards 33rd Anniversary Gala in New York City in coordinating black ensembles.

Both of the Live with Kelly and Mark cohosts opted for classic black suits, but Ripa turned her look up a notch by wearing a sheer black lace top under her jacket.

The star kept her glam simple with a glowing makeup look and her hair in soft waves.

Ripa and Consuelos, both 54, appeared at the gala to celebrate their talk show’s producer Michael Gelman’s induction into the Broadcasting + Cable Hall of Fame.

“I’m not gonna lie, I got very emotional,” Ripa shared on the Wednesday, Oct. 1 episode of Live with Kelly and Mark.

When Gelman thanked them both for giving speeches during the ceremony, Ripa shared, “It was a pleasure and a privilege.”

“We don’t leave the house very often, and any time I have to put on makeup at 6 p.m. I resent it,” Ripa joked during the show.

On the Tuesday, Sept. 30 episode of Live with Kelly and Mark, Ripa and Consuelos got into a playful scuffle about her home state of New Jersey.

Consuelos recalled a moment from early in their relationship when they moved to New Jersey, where Ripa is from, saying, “I remembered how weird it was that you could not make a left anywhere.”

“Yeah, but it sort of impacts the way you move through the world,” Ripa said. “I move through the world never going left.”

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While not all traditional left turns are barred in New Jersey, the state does implement jughandles as a means for cars to make safer left turns on high-traffic roadways.

Consuelos said Ripa “definitely had it” with him on a trip when he was “complaining so much about New Jersey” and the state’s “rules,” with him admitting, “I think I used the word ‘communist.’ “

“I said something crazy, and then we pulled into a gas station and I couldn’t pump my own gas,” he continued. “And that’s when I made a comment and you lost it.”

“I did, yes,” Ripa agreed.

The couple, who met on the set of All My Children in 1995 and married the following year, also debated the state’s law stating that customers cannot pump their own gas.

Ripa and Consuelos have been co-hosting Live together since 2023, following Ryan Seacrest‘s departure from the daytime talk show.