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Ruby-Doo Ascendant

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So Ruby the Corgi Pup seems finally to have thrown off whatever was afflicting her with chronic doggy diarrhea. She’s  no longer squirting brown puddles all over every flat surface she encounters, and she’s gaining weight apace. The floors have been soaked with enzyme odor remover — I hope not to smell that lingering schmell the next time I walk in the front door — and all is quiet at the Funny Farm.

Uh, well…no. “Quiet” is probably not le mot  juste. Now that Ruby is feeling much, much better, she’s rising to full puppyhood. Where before she was a mild, well-behaved, and mostly silent little dog, now she has learned to pester and to BARK. Just now she’s driving Cassie nuts, which is good because it means she’s not driving me nuts. They’re chasing around the yard like rockets. Cassie knows, by instinct, that the way to control a kid is to run ’em!

With her newly discovered Voice, Ruby is also coming into her own as a watch-puppy. Holy mackerel, is that dog turning into a watch-puppy!

Last night my neighbor María called. I didn’t pick up the phone until the voicemail had started to record her, which meant (for those of you who have forgotten how land-lines speak to humans) the base phone and all six little walk-around phones flashed a reminder light. I forgot to delete that message, so the base phone in the room across the hall was still flashing when we all went to bed.

Four o’clock in the morning:  FRENZY FROM THE FOOT OF THE BED! The pup is growling — as in really growling, deep and fierce — and she’s on full alert, every muscle in her little body tense. Cassie is trying to sleep, leading me to think this is not very serious. But the pup will not be calmed.

Finally I realize she can see the light flashing in the other room. Dunno what she thinks it is, but apparently she’s never noticed it before. To quiet her down, I had to pick her up off the bed, carry her across the hall, let her inspect the flashing phone, and erase the damn message to make it quit nagging.

Within the next day or two, I need to wean her off the “bland diet” of hamburger and rice with the daily vitamin pill supplement. I’m thinking it would be good to start by adding a teaspoonful or so of yogurt to her food, by way of jacking up the calcium content — beef and rice are devoid of calcium, and a growing pup needs that for bone health. The vitamins have a dose of the stuff, of course, but I’d rather rely on real food than on pills by way of nourishment.

Cassie needs some more fiber in her diet just now, and so whenever I get out of class, come back and check on the cleaning lady (yes…today is CL Day), and check the e-mail, it’ll be off to Sprouts to pick up some butternut squash and yams.  So those can be the first additions, too, to Ruby’s expanding diet. Want to try one item at a time, to ascertain whether any one ingredient makes her sick.

In my experience, when a dog eats real food (meat, starch, and dog-friendly veggies) it does not experience the intestinal upset that happens when you switch commercial foods. Cassie can eat virtually anything and switches between chicken, beef, pork, and turkey without a problem. The same was true of the German shepherd and the greyhound, both of which, before I discovered real food, would get violent diarrhea anytime I had to change commercial brands.

I suspect this was the case with Ruby, too. She got switched among a  half-dozen dog foods as she came off the prescription diet and I tried to find a similar canned food that would sustain her without bankrupting me. I should’ve been a little more confident — or, shall we say, a great deal more resistant to Big Pet Industry’s propaganda — and simply have gone directly to meals of real food.

Also I would like to get rid of the space-eating X-pen in the family room. Ruby no longer needs to be penned up when I’m gone — she’s fully housebroken, and she’s not inclined to eat the furniture, ô mirabilis! But just now it serves the purpose of keeping her from raiding Cassie’s food dish during the dinner hour. All she has to do is look crooked at Cassie, and Cassie will back away from her food. So I’ve been feeding Ruby inside her X-pen and Cassie in the kitchen.

Dawned on me that I could set Ruby’s food outside the back door and close the security door while they eat, at least in the mornings. On a 110-degree day, of course, it’s too hot to banish her to the porch for noon and evening meals, but the mornings are plenty cool enough.

The crafts room and the storage room are both barricaded off with step-over baby gates, thereby reducing the number of square feet for Ruby to pee and poop on. Those gates could go away, I think, now that she’s house-trained. But just now Petsmart has a hinged gate on sale. I’m thinking to replace one of those inconvenient stationery gates with a gate that opens and closes, and then Ruby could go in a back room to eat, until such time as she learns not to bully Cassie. That, of course, may be never…but kulawahed. With a gate that the pup doesn’t have to be lifted over and that won’t trip me and land me face-first on the floor, I can feed them separately for as long as both dogs are living.

How exactly these animals are going to be dealt with when I’m convalescing from surgery remains to be seen. The appointed date is a Thursday, and my son is going to take off a day or two to watch out over me. So if he’s here on Friday, he can feed the dogs and pick up and refill the heavy water dishes. Maybe he can help on the weekend, too. But after that: ?????

Oh well. More pressing matters await: to wit, it’s time to get ready to go to class.

Only two more days of class left! Thank goodness.

Cultiver notre jardin…

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P1030115How do you like these nifty little plants? Spent part of yesterday cultivating the garden a bit — not much, the day having reached 110 by noon, but some. I found the posies at Home Depot, where I’d gone to pick up some pool chemicals and came away with a bunch of gear, including citrus fertilizer, bird seed, and a cute new hummingbird feeder. (Click on the image for a better view.)

The plants in one big pot outside the back door have long since croaked over. That’s been an annoyance for some time, but I’ve been too lazy to do much about it. Lured by the garden department, I picked up these things. The blue flowers are called angelonia; it’s supposedly almost heat-proof. We’ll see: the hot-weather plant reports come from places like New Orleans and Florida, which don’t hold a candle (heh!) to Arizona in the heat department. And of course, the pink and yellow number is a lantana. It loves an Arizona summer, though I don’t know how well it will do in a pot. If you don’t water potted plants first thing every morning here, they fricassee. Forthwith. Even if you manage to remember every single day, though, a pot acts like a steamer.

About half the pot’s soil had seeped out through the bottom hole. That was convenient, because the level was so low no digging and dumping was necessary. All I had to do lift the (rootbound) plants out of their plastic pots, set them in place, and fill in with potting soil…which I had to haul out of the car and drag to the backyard.

Then it was time to fertilize the citrus. I couldn’t lift the bag I’d bought at HD, of course, and so had to tip it out of the car onto a dolly. It immediately fell off the dolly, which was not very pleasant, but eventually I managed to drag it out to the back yard, cut it open, and spread 20 pounds of fertilizer around the trees, one two-pound can at a time. Drag the hose and water, water, water, water…

antMeanwhile, the Ondt Queen is regrouping after her last engagement with the Bosch. She has built a new fortification in the side yard, extending deep into the earth under a flagstone slab. They haven’t tried to come into the house yet, but if you walk near their place, they will attack, and they bite something fierce.

Having learned that Ruby the Corgi Pup has a taste for ant bait and can handily weasel one out from under the fan cage that I’ve used in the past to dog-proof the things, I’m cast back upon more ancient battle strategies.

To wit: birds.

When I first moved in here, the backyard was just overrun with biting ants. To combat them, I bought a couple of bird feeders, filled them with seeds, and cast a lot of seed on the ground around the various ant holes. This worked well — within a few weeks, the backyard was almost ant-free.

Most birds will eat the occasional ant, and some will eat a lot of ants — mockingbirds and Gila woodpeckers and thrashers and flickers and towhees. Interestingly, even the little sparrows of which we have a-plenty, enjoy some ant protein in their diet. So I filled both feeders, one of which hangs from a rafter not far from the new Ant Castle, and sprinkled a trail of seed leading from the feeder’s vicinity to the ant holes.

But…well…

Yes, Houston, we DO have a problem…

P1030113Turns out Ruby likes bird seed even more than she likes ant baits! Took her all of four seconds to find that stuff, and she immediately started scarfing it down.

Godlmighty.

Dragged her into the house, mightily against her will. Locked her up. Raked the birdseed into small areas. Retrieved some wire garden border fencing and stuck it in the ground so it would surround the seed patches.

But meanwhile, when I brought this container of seed home from HD, what I didn’t know was the lid on it was not attached. When I’d picked it up on the back patio preparatory to carrying it over to where the feeders were, the lid fell off and about a quarter of the damn stuff dumped out on the ground — and into the wide, river-stone-filled cracks between the flagstones off the porch! Ruby was trying to Hoover that stuff up, too. Even though I broomed it up off the concrete, I couldn’t get it out from between the flags.

So before Ruby could go back outdoors, I had to drag the shop vac out there and shop-vac up as much of the seed as I could, in the process sucking a ton of stones into the vacuum.

Lovely.

So the rocks had had to be cleaned out and placed back where they belong and the vacuum wrestled back into the garage.

See what I mean when I say every job around this place morphs into three or four jobs? Never fails!

Anyway, this morning the birds found the seed and by about 9 a.m. had picked it all up off the ground. Presumably, too, they discovered the colony of their rightful prey. It is to be hoped they will not forget anytime soon.

Moving on, I cleaned the algae off the pool walls (again) and applied the daily water to the potted plants that are not on the watering system and dumped some of the citrus food on the baby olive and watered that in and dosed the dog for the unsurprising new round of diarrhea and for crying out loud. Trimmed most of the dead stuff off the moribund lavender plant, a much-loved garden resident that appears unlikely to survive much longer.

The heat is ferocious at this time of year. The first part of July usually hosts the hottest day of any given summer, and though we haven’t had an extremely hot day (110 is about has high as it’s gone), the plants are prostrate. Unless we get rain, and a fair amount of it, I’ll lose quite a few of them when I’m laid up with the pending not-quite-but-just-about cancer surgery. And God only knows what will happen with the pool: it now has to be brushed every day, and will until November, when I can drain it and replace the phosphate-saturated, years-old water with new, fresh water. It’s frustrating. And annoying.

Cancer? Not so much…

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Yesterday my son took off work to schlep out to the Mayo with me and hold my  hand as I entered the Land of Sickness. We were to meet with a high-powered surgeon to whom I was referred by my long-time doc and old friend, Tim Daley. After a brief wait, we were ushered into the catacombs.

You would not believe the difference between the way you’re dealt with at St. Joe’s and at the Mayo. First off, we were met by a nurse practitioner who handed me a whole book on breast cancer and a notebook filled with business cards & phone numbers of people to call at the Mayo, with all sorts of information, with what to expect, and on and on. She asked a bunch of questions, filled in forms, and moved on. Then a PA came in, did an exam and asked more questions.

And finally Her Royal Majesty arrived. And what an incredible lady that one is!!!

She also examined me, and she’d already read the pathologist’s reports and studied the mammogram. She was annoyed that St. Joe’s hadn’t done another mammogram after the biopsy to confirm that they’d placed the marker tags correctly, and said now that has to be done. Then she said the following:

At this point she believes these are ductal carcinomas in situ (DCIS). They are not exactly cancers; they are pre-cancers. She assessed them as “Stage 0,” about as close to harmless as they can get without being nonexistent.

Not all DCIS lesions develop into cancer, and if they do, they develop very slowly. They could turn into cancer in a year, two years, ten years, twenty…or maybe never. However, the problem is that ALL breast cancers start as DCIS. Because there’s no way (yet) for doctors to know which DCISes will become invasive cancers, which ones will just sit there, and which may even fade away, the wisest course of action is to have them removed by way of surgery. But that’s all that is necessary. And there’s no hurry.

The current standards for lumpectomy no longer require such a wide margin of healthy tissue to be removed around a DCIS, and so the procedure is relatively minor compared to what one would have expected in the past. Once removed, the things have to be examined by a pathologist, but if they are what she believes them to be, there will be no need for any other treatment. No radiation. No hormone treatments. No chemotherapy.

She thinks these critters have been in there for years — she explained in detail why she thinks so, based on the known growth rate of papillary carcinomas — and were simply not seen on earlier mammograms when my lush besoom was denser and the machinery was less sensitive.

She explained that radiation therapy is an option, but that it would reduce the already extremely low probability of a recurrence by about one or two percentage points. I asked her whether, if she were in this position, she would opt for radiation.

“No,” she said, “I wouldn’t have radiation. But then…that’s just me.”

Looked at her and thought, Lady, you are one hell of a lot smarter than me and you are staggeringly expert on this subject. If you’re not havin’ it, neither am I.

So I scheduled a lumpectomy for August 7. She said one should be up and about in a day or two and back in the swimming pool after two weeks.

How amazing is that?

And, we might add, how effin’ outrageous…

The radiologist at St Joe’s said to me, in reporting on the biopsy results over the telephone, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but it’s cancer.” Period. Evidently that was a slight exaggeration…

This was after I had been told, by another radiologist there, that there was a 50% chance those little lumps were cancer. So they had me prepped to believe I already have cancer, and then they delivered exactly that news.

In fact, they’re not benign…but neither are they actually cancer. Not yet, anyway. Nor are they going to become cancer in the very near future.

My friend KJG, on hearing this, remarked on the difference between the medical treatment you get in hospitals in affluent vs. not-so-affluent neighborhoods. Ain’t it the truth, apparently: few places get more affluent than northeast Scottsdale. And another friend remarked, after admitting to a skeptical turn of mind, on how much St. Joe’s stood to gain by corralling me into six or eight weeks of daily unnecessary radiation treatment.

Un-freaking-believable.

So it looks like a confluence of lucky events rescued me from a great deal of painful, pointless, and dangerous trauma:

  • Old Doc Daley moved from his mid-town practice to the Mayo shortly after the clinic opened in Scottsdale, all those years ago.
  • I managed to keep myself on the Mayo’s rolls after hitting Medicare age by sticking with him.
  • St. Joe’s ER damn near killed me with the crassest kind of neglect when I had appendicitis some years ago, and so I wouldn’t have surgery done at that hospital, not on a bet.
  • And past experience has convinced me that you should ALWAYS GET A SECOND OPINION before letting anybody do any kind of procedure on you or put you on some drug.

Always. Get. A. Second. Opinion.

News of the Day…

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…Boob Department.

So, late, late late yesterday afternoon St. Joe’s called with the verdict on the biopsy: it’s cancer.

However, as cancers go, it’s far from the worst of all possible worlds. Their pathologist declared it a papillary carcinoma, which is a rare cancer that, in older women, is usually slow-growing. And in my case, both tumors are “encapsulated,” which means they’re closed off from spreading around with gay abandon.

If she’s correct, then as this kind of news goes, it’s actually fairly positive: According to the American Journal of Clinical Pathology “EPCs [encapsulated papillary carcinomas) are in situ carcinomas with an excellent prognosis and can be managed with local therapy with or without sentinel lymph node biopsy.”

That’s from a 2009 paper, so of course it’s a bit old. However, from what the radiologist said, the thinking must still be along these lines. She said they no longer yank out your lymph nodes — which, other than the disfiguration of your boob (which is hardly fatal), is the big issue with breast cancer, because it leaves you vulnerable to infection of even the tiniest little nick or paper cut.

Rummaging through the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest, we find a literature review in an open-access journal. Open access is less questionable in the hard sciences than it is in the humanities. As of 2014, this review of published research indicates “this form of cancer is usually low grade and rarely recurs. . . . Understanding the low-grade nature of this form of breast cancer allows treatment options to be less radical and safely omitted.” However, this same group of authors calls papillary breast cancer “diagnostically challenging” and remarks that if the tumor appears in conjunction with invasive cancer, that might not be great, especially if it occurs in a younger woman. However, I fortunately am old as the hills, and I’m told these things were quite small.

And finally, the Brits say, in a website dumbed down for the public, “Doctors usually treat papillary breast cancer with surgery. These cancers usually grow slowly, and don’t usually spread to the lymph glands or other parts of the body.”

So if I’m understanding what the woman said to me, it looks like the outlook is about as positive as it can get for a cancer diagnosis. I feel a great deal less frantic than I did while waiting for news…right now what I most want is just to get the surgery under way, get the damn things out of my boob, and move on.

My son is going to take the dogs for as long as I’m incapacitated. Suspecting this was coming up the pike, I’ve already hired a cleaning lady and lined up a pool guy. Cleaning lady has begun deconstructing my house — in addition to breaking the vacuum cleaner ($140!), she also quietly knocked the shower door off its track. Neighbor is coming over this evening to try to fix it. I just hate hiring cleaning help…honest to god, they do more damage than good! And then when they break things, they don’t tell you — they leave it for you to find out. Had a helluva time getting out of the shower stall this morning.

Let’s hope that’s not true of pool guys.

Tomorrow I’m meeting with a surgeon at the Mayo. I have no intention of letting St. Joseph’s cut me up, having damn near died there a few years ago. Besides, St. Joe’s Healthgrades ratings for patient safety are much lower that the Mayo’s and even lower than John C. Lincoln’s. JCL is located in the heart of a desperate slum, for hevvinsake, a few blocks from the headquarters of a dangerous meth gang. So…one wonders. At any rate, if I have to get radiation treatment and the Mayo doesn’t do that at its (relatively nearby) hospital on the 101, then I’ll have to get that done at JCL or St. Joe’s, since I can’t afford the gas to drive halfway to Payson five days a week for five to eight weeks.

So things appear to be as under control as they’re going to get. Unless, of course, the Mayo’s surgeon upsets the apple cart tomorrow…

Somethin’s gotta go…

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And I think it’s about to be this puppy…

Today or tomorrow, the biopsy report is supposed to come in. If it’s cancer, the first thing that’s gonna happen is Ruby is going straight back to the breeder. I certainly can’t care for her if I’ve got half my boob lopped off and am looking at weeks of irradiation and subsequent radiation sickness.

Even if it’s benign, I may have to return her. Mortal illness or no, we’re rapidly reaching the point here where I can’t take care of her.

She barfed all over the bed again last night. So at midnight I had to pull ALL the bedding off and remake the bed. This was after she’d had me up about once an hour from 10:00 forward.

Of course she went back in her crate at that point. Briefly. For the rest of the night, she was up about once every hour. I finally had to put her back on the bed to get her to settle down long enough to get 90 minutes’ or an hour’s worth of  uninterrupted rest.

I think her UTI is probably back, since I can’t find any new dog mounds in the yard, which means she’s not wanting to run out to squirt brown puddles on the ground. And what causes the barfing, I can’t imagine. This was SIX HOURS after she’d been fed. Normally, a dog’s food moves through its stomach quite fast. The entire digestive process takes six to eight hours. So she shouldn’t be woofing up virtually undigested food after six hours. Since the food does seem to be undigested, she actually may be regurgitating rather than vomiting, but if that’s the case, it’s mighty weird that the food would sit there without moving for all of six hours. In either case, it sounds like an expensive fix. Or a lifelong nightmare struggle.

{sigh} So. To add hassle on top of headache on top of worry, I’ll have to call the vet this morning and make an appointment so as to get in the door if I don’t have cancer (50-50 chance, we’re told), and then explain that if the biopsy results are positive, we’ll have to cancel because the puppy is going back where she came from. First thing, though — like right this minute — I’ve got to wash the sheets, blanket, and doggy throw.

In any event, the pup’s health issues are starting to drive  me crazy. I can’t deal with all this sh!t at once. Last night I didn’t read the stoont papers that came in — figure to read those while the students are in class today, since they’ll be in the computer commons putatively working on their 2500-word final papers (read “playing computer games, checking in at Twitter & FB, and surfing the Web”).

Even if the stress of the cancer scare goes away, come next Tuesday I’ll still have 62,500 words of drivel to read in a matter of maybe three days. Fortunately my associate will be back in town pretty quick, but since one invariably becomes sick after riding on airplanes and since she’ll be coming in from halfway around the world, it remains to be seen whether she’ll be in any shape to help out.

Day from Hell? Or Day from Monty Python’s Flying Circus?

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I have exceeded my capacity to write much further about yesterday’s little drama, so feel free to go to the my corgi blog and read all about it. [?? I do not know why this link isn’t working. Enter this URL instead: mycorgi.com/profiles/blogs/parvo-really]

Not for an instant do I believe Ruby has parvo (forgodsake!). For the past hour she’s been flinging herself around pestering Cassie, barking at the neighbors, racing up and down the hall squeaking a toy, stealing a sandal and banging it on the wall, climbing on top of me, grabbing Cassie’s ball, and (let us never forget) chasing cockroaches around the backyard. This is not the behavior of a dog that is trying to slip past Cerberus and sneak into Hades.

What I do believe is that last night I encountered an unethical veterinarian who took one look at an old lady with a puppy of an expensive breed and heard the cash register ring.

The pet industry in this country (and make no mistake: that is what it is officially called — even vets will tell you they’re part of the pet industry) is a vast cash cow. There is so much money to be made in fleecing people who are besotted by their animals, it cannot even be estimated.

I should have known when I drove up there and saw signs in the parking lot reading “Reserved for Pet Parents.”

Pet parents! SNORT!!!

That is a trope whose purpose is to encourage people to conflate their animals with their children. Once they have you thinking about your dog or your cat as though it were your child, it’s easy to play on your emotions and get you to fork over any amount of money the various merchandisers in the pet industry choose for whatever service, medication, food, tool, doodad, or piece of kitsch they can come up with.

Parvo, indeed. I’m still so mad, just thinking about it, I could throw this computer across the room!