When you are the Human and there is only one of you, and there are two or more canids inhabiting your space, then you live in the Company of Dogs. Not the other way around. You may imagine they live in your company, just because you serve them food and provide a fine waterproof den for them and expend your treasure on their vet bills. But in reality: no. They are not your pack. You (you absurd creature) are part of their pack.
Cassie the Corgi, a.k.a. The Queen of the Universe, is in the second day of a rare recovery from her chronic illness. If we think of her condition on a continuum of 1 to 10, with 1 being next to dead and 10 being back to normal, she is in Day 2 of Condition 10.
This, as you might imagine, poses a challenge for her sidekick, Ruby the (former) Corgi Pup, especially given the amount of time her Queenship has hovered around a 5.
Off with her head!
As Cassie has faded, Ruby has taken on Presence. She has, of late, become muscular and imposing. If she were a German shepherd who weighed 90 pounds instead of 23 pounds, she would be effing scary. The Human, silently alarmed, had taken the position that it is the boss, even though this position increasingly appears to be, well…off-course. Cassie the Queen of the Universe has taken the position that the whole mess pisses Her Dogship off, but there’s not a lot she can do about it, other than threatening to remove Ruby’s head, which we all know is not a-gonna happen.
Something there is about canid competition that is unnerving. Ruby has decided that Cassie will not have her usual privileges:
Being elevated onto the bed first
Being de-elevated off the bed first
Being served the Dog Treat first
Being regarded with Dog and Human deference
Obtaining the Preferred nest at floor level
Getting out the Back Door first
Getting in the Back Door first
Taking up the First Position first — or else
This competition is having two effects on the Pack company:
To piss off the Queen (never, ever a good thing; think “OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!”)
To scare the bedoodles out of the Human, which has to keep dodging expressions of rage and irritability amongst the Dogs
If dogs could be Cheshire Cats or Queens of Hearts, these creatures would be those.
So another of the many things you know, if you’ve been reading this site for long, is that one of my many eccentricities is a penchant for concocting home-made dog food for the hounds. This is not very hard to do, nor is it very hard to find out what should go into it, since a number of university veterinary programs and similar credible sources publish discussions of canine nutritional needs.
Vets, when they find out you do this, get very nervous: they define “people food” (a derisive term) as fast-food burgers and pizza. Naturally, anyone with half an ounce of sense does not define junk food as “people food” — or, come to think of it, even as “food.” No. The Funny Farm canids get a mix of something over a third high-quality meat protein, about a third mixed, ground vegetables (yes, Virginia: dogs are omnivores), and about a third starchy food known to be highly digestible dogs. Do not fear: dogs have been living with humans for something over 16,000 years, during which time they have been sharing the humans’ diet with no ill effect. Specially formulated magical “dog food” was invented and sold to a waiting world in the first third of the 20th century…to no great improvement in dog life expectancy.
So, okay. While Cassie has been struggling with her current life-threatening ailment, I became scared by the Veterinary Babble about DIY dog food. (Why this should scare me escapes common sense: it was, after all, MarvelVet’s ill-conceived scheme to convince me that the dog had Valley fever that made the poor beast sick unto death.) But that notwithstanding…during all this, I feared that maybe the home-brewed chow was inadequate, and consequently started feeding her exclusively FreshPet with a little canned food to top it by way of tricking her to swallow pills.
FreshPet is the stuff that comes in rolls. Read the ingredients and compare with other pet junkfood and you’ll see it comes closer than most of them to real food, and it’s available in several grocery stores, obviating yet another annoying trip and yet another stand in line in yet another annoying retail establishment. [If you like to scare yourself, read the ingredients on a can of Pedigree “chicken” dog food: makes a great Hallowe’en tale.]
This seemed to work OK. Cassie doesn’t care. She’s a corgi. Corgis will eat anything.
The dog survived many weeks of debilitating illness. She still lives, though not well.
A couple weeks ago, I took it into my feeble head to cook up some real food for the dogs. Why, I do not recall: probably to clean out the freezer.
Put a dish of this down in front of Cassie…and she inhales it with obvious joy. The other dog is jumping around in ecstasy, too.
Hm. Okay. They like real dog food. Apparently they like real dog food better than they fancy the factory-made gunk.
I did this on December 4.
Within a day — on December 5 — she was significantly improved: up to a 9 on a scale of 1 (moribund) to 10 (normal). Dayum!
She continued to have her ups and downs, but overall the trend from there on was upward. After an episode where she backslid to a 5 or 6, yesterday I would say she was as close to a 10 as she’s ever going to get. She was actually running around the backyard after Ruby.
That’s something, since this dog has barely been able to walk on occasion.
Will she recover her old self?
How do I doubt it? Let me count the ways. But it’s beginning to look like she may survive. And it’s even possible that most of the time she won’t be unthinkably miserable.
Here’s the problem with making dog food…well…one of the several problems: Holidays.
Every.
Single.
Goddamn.
Time…
…a holiday comes along, you will run out of dog food. This means that to buy ingredients for the next batch, you will have to do battle with endless lines in grocery stores. That’s assuming you can find a grocery store that’s open.
Making dog food is a rather messy and time-consuming job, and really not what you feel like doing while you’re wrestling with holiday activities. And certainly not something you want to have to do under the time pressure posed by the holiday closure of the stores that carry the ingredients.
And yep. As is the case every year… Here we are, two days before Christmas, and we run out of dawg food.
So I spent half the afternoon in the kitchen, up to my elbows in chicken grease — the process was made much messier by my having stupidly purchased bone-in chicken thighs instead of Costco’s best boned, skinless things. With, we might add, a bandage that goes halfway up my forearm, having cleverly burnt the bejayzus out of myself yesterday.
We now have a giant pot of dog food.
The dogs eat about a pound of it a day.
This means we will run out…yes…right before New Year’s Day.
😀
And that will mean yet another Costco run. Ugh. Amidst mobs of armchair sports fans stocking up with food and booze for the New Year’s Big Games.
As for now, though: it’s away to choir. Compline. You should try it sometime. You’ll like it.
Cassie the Corgi, who (thanks to an unholy combination of fluconazole and prednisone) has been pounding at Death’s Door for the past three months, has apparently decided they won’t have her in those precincts and so has given up. She’s still pretty feeble, but over the past three days she’s experienced a kind of Resurgence. She’s almost sprung back to normal.
Or…staggered back.
Noticed that when she did not sleep well — which was most of the time — she seemed much worse the following day. For awhile there, most nights she struggled to breathe and occasionally enjoyed seizures violent enough to alarm Ruby the Corgi Pup and, most certainly, the Human.
Along about the second week of October, it occurred to me to drug her with Benadryl to see if that would help her to sleep. Yes, I know: highly problematic. But I figured if it killed her, it wouldn’t much matter because she was about to die anyway.
On three separate occasions, I felt pretty certain that she was about to die. On a couple of days, I had to leave and couldn’t get out of it, and thought very likely she would be gone by the time I got back. And more recently there was a fourth occasion when I doubted she would see the next day’s dawn.
The Benadryl, oddly enough, did seem to help. Her breathing got somewhat easier. Though she might have a spell during the night, it wasn’t terrifying to the onlooker. And it (or something) did seem to stop the seizures. She certainly wasn’t well. But at least she wasn’t keeping me and her roommate awake all night with her miseries.
Now, over the past few days, she’s suddenly taken a turn for the much better. On December 9, both dogs and the human were sick. I rated Cassie’s condition as a “4” on a scale of 1 to 10.
The following day, she was up to about an 8 by 6 a.m., and as the day progressed she rose to a 9. She’s had a couple days of 9s, but regresses on the 9th after a bad night. Still, by 10 a.m. on the 12th she seemed to be back up to the level of about a 9. A-n-n-d…she’s stayed there for the past while.
Seeing that she was no longer suffering distress at night, I tried easing her off the Benadryl. This seems not to have caused any harm, and indeed may be contributing to her recovery. Dogs, like humans, are knocked for a loop by Benadryl.
Can’t say she’s back to normal. She certainly isn’t. But she’s a lot better than she was.
She still looks and acts like an OLD dog.
But… She was looking and acting pretty grizzled before the present horror show descended upon her. She is, after all, at least 12 years old. She may be significantly older than that. All we know is that 10 years ago the Humane Society claimed she was 2 years old…and if you’ve ever watched an animal rescue worker, you know how those estimates are arrived at.
Uhhhhhhh….mmmmm…. Thisyere dawg is about two years old. I reckon…
So…she could be 11 years old. She could be 15 years old. And if she’s either of those…well…looking and acting like an old dog is entirely within reason.
I wondered if iatrogenic renal dysfunction might pass on its own, if the dog were allowed to rest and recuperate long enough. Nothing that I could find anywhere indicated that might be the case, except for an occasional mention that negative side effects of Prednisone would pass after the drug was stopped. But Prednisone alone was not the problem. The problem was interaction of Prednisone and inappropriately prescribed fluconazole in the presence of an unrecognized adrenal tumor, whose malignancy or nonmalignancy remains to this day unknown. Whether the victim of this combination of circumstances could throw off the effects unaided: also unknown. Possibly even a question that has never been asked.
She still wears the Tragic Expression most of the time, though occasionally she perks up enough to look almost like her old self. More significantly, though, she’s stopped shitting and pissing all over the floors. I haven’t had to clean up a puddle or a pile in the past three days. And that does feel like some kind of miracle.
Remember how I was wondering whether a possible misdiagnosis of Valley fever by MarvelVet might be what’s killing my dog? Well…yeah. Just talked to NewVet: the results of the second Valley fever test are back. And no.
No. She does not have and never has had Valley fever.
So basically: we have destroyed this dog’s health and very probably killed her by giving her fluconozale on top of prednisone. Or prednisone on top of fluconozale, however you wish to look at it.
That is not a benign combination. What can it cause? Adrenal gland dysfunction.
And yeah, again. That is exactly what has happened. It destroyed Cassie the Corgi. Her health is permanently ruined, and really, if I had a backbone I’d put her down now.
This has happened under the watch of the Great Skeptic. Remember, I am the one who keeps carping away that one should QUESTION AUTHORITY. Don’t take what your doctor (or a vet) says without looking it up yourself, understanding what ails you, and understanding what the proposed treatments will do for you and to you. Sometimes the treatment is worse than the disease.
That certainly is the case here. We basically killed this dog by putting her on a cough suppressant with prednisone plus an antifungal in the absence of no empirical evidence that a fungal infection was what ailed her. Instead, what ailed her was what was obvious: a bronchial infection that was going around the city at the time and that, probably thanks to the dog’s old age, advanced to pneumonia. She should have been treated with an antibiotic. In fact, when NewVet put her on doxycycline for a UTI, her cough cleared right up.
Well, that’s not funny, given how sick poor old Cassie has been.
Actually, Cassie is presently somewhat better, other than having come completely unhouse-trained. She now poops and pees wherever and whenever she pleases. Fortunately, it’s usually on the pee pads I put in her favorite locales — something that’s getting pretty pricey, since I have to pick up and replace four to six of them a day. But sometimes it’s on the bathroom or bedroom rugs. Yay. At any rate, she doesn’t appear to be feeling as bad as she did.
Which is not to say she appears to be feeling well. I’d guess she’s running at about 80%…maybe 90% on a really good day. Whatever happened to her doesn’t appear to be about to go away.
Meanwhile…hoooboy!
Last night Ruby started barfing spectacularly. She apparently ate something that made her good and sick. It soon became apparent that this was not a life-threatening thing…but by “soon” we mean sometime after midnight.
Ruby and Cassie both are in the habit of “harvesting” mummified oranges that fall off the trees and dry up, often after having been chewed out by the roof rats. They bring these crispy treats into the house, hide them in the bathroom, and crunch them up into crumbs. What a mess to clean up!
Well, they’ve never made either dog sick before, but apparently this time one of them did.
The real concern, though, when a dog starts barfing, is that we have some nut cases around here — apparently among the drug-addled vagrant population — who have been known to throw poison treats over people’s fences, thereby killing their dogs. It’s a strategy used by burglars, but neighbors have reported having small, harmless dogs targeted. So given both dogs’ corgi-esque love of yapping, of course an unexpected, apparently reasonless barfing attack causes some worry.
By 2 or 3 in the morning, though, her stomach calmed down and she seemed OK. Come the light of dawn, she was fine. Fed her hamburger (cooked) and rice this morning and again this evening: she seems to have recovered.
I, however, have yet to recover from the three-hour night. 😀
Today I managed to geta new chapter of Ella’s Story on-line. Not quite by the self-imposed deadline…but only a day late. Since no dollars are concerned, we need not add the dollah-short part.
But this was accomplished, I’m afraid, not by actually finishing the chapter as conceived, but simply by spotting a natural pause and cutting it off there. Between the sick dogs and my natural laziness and a general feeling of overwhelmed-itude, the truth is I’m not applying myself to this project for the enough hours a day to make the required progress. One of the things it illustrates, though, is how amazing those late 19th-century and early 20th-century writers were, in their ability to produce novels on the installment plan. Dickens, for example…and Poe, I believe, among many others, would write segments of novels for periodicals. And of course, they had deadlines, just like a journalist does.
Having amused myself as a magazine journalist for a good 15 years, I can assure you that a journalistic deadline is one helluva lot easier to meet than one that requires you to make stuff up and then turn your imaginings into something believable. Or at least more or less readable. A workaday magazine or newspaper article pretty much writes itself, growing like crabgrass out of your interviews and research online and in print sources. A piece of fiction? Not so much…
To my intense annoyance, I discovered that somehow WordPress had disappeared Chapter 11. I know I put it online, because I remember the images I posted with it, and because those images still lurk in the “Media Library.” So I had to reconstruct that, yet another time-killer.
One advantage Poe and Twain and Dickens and all those had over us wretches in the Digital Age is that all they had to do was write the damn stuff. They didn’t have to publish it, too. They had…oh, does anyone remember them?…publishers who edited and typeset and designed and laid out and illustrated and proofread and printed and distributed their work. Today those who imagine they will find great fame in self-publishing have to do all that themselves. And none of us is qualified to do all those things well.
Not by a long shot. Nor does having to devote half to three-quarters of your time to jobs you don’t want to do and aren’t really trained to do leave enough hours for you to do what you do want to do and what maybe you’re good at: to write. I am so very tired of spending hour after hour after hour in digital ditz! Just to create a table of contents for the 33 chapters I’ve put online in Ella’s Story required me to do 297 mind-numbing, repetitive, tedious computer operations today. That’s not counting the typos, which in having to be redone probably expanded that number by about 10 percent.
I un-friended the FB writer’s group I’ve belonged to for the past two years or so. That was too bad, because each week they give you a chance to publish some magnum opus…which has conveniently allowed me to publicize my emittances with some regularity. Haven’t noticed any increase in sales, though.
What I have noticed, however, is this 7th-grade mean girl they’ve picked up. She’s very, very nasty. Today she took aim at me. My response to that is simple enough: fuckyouverymuch. I don’t hang around where I’m not wanted, so off I went. That, we might add, will be one fewer electronic time-suck. I don’t know whether organizers of those groups try to moderate them, or if they even can — this one is quite large. But evidently someone needs to.
And now for something completely different… Did you know that you can still read books?
No, I mean real books, the things shaped like boxes with this hinge-like strip along one edge to which pieces of paper are attached.
The Brothers Grimm
Couple months ago, I’m at the Costco and I happen to spot this old-fashioned-looking hardback with an embossed cover and gold-leaf print: Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales.
WTF!?! Last time I saw that book, it was at my great-grandmother’s house in Berkeley, back in another century when normal people could afford to live in Berkeley. It is a beautiful little production, published by some outfit called Canterbury Classics, out of San Diego. Gosh.
So for old time’s sake, I bought the thing. Stuck it on the nightstand and went off and forgot it.
One evening I started browsing through it and was reminded of what a hoot the original Grimm’s tales were. This is great stuff! And perfect bedside reading, when you’re so tired you can barely lift the dogs onto the sack. They’re very short, pretty light (in a strange and sometimes not-so-light way), and none of them require a sustained attention span.
So the other day I’m back at Costco and what do I find but a whole SLEW of these Canterbury Classics! Hot diggety! How can I leave them alone?
Yes, I know: Impulse Buy Hell. But hey: how often do you get to buy embossed hard-cover books with gold-leaf print all over them?
Grab Bulfinch’s Mythology and, by god, the original Thomas Burton’s Arabian Nights.
This stuff is too, too good. It is going to keep me amused for weeks. Maybe even months.
The Brothers Grim: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=165364
Frontispiece to Burton’s Arabian Knights. By Adolphe Lalauze (1838-1906) – A plain and literal translation of the Arabian nights entertainments, now entitled The book of the thousand nights and a night Vol. 1, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11033095
Cassie the Corgi is not dead yet, but it’s pretty clear that sooner or later the adrenal gland dysfunction that has afflicted her since I took her to MarvelVet to treat a cough will carry her away.
I’ve suspected for some time that the medications he gave her made her sicker — a lot sicker — than she was. The combination of prednisone and fluconozale, as it develops, is contraindicated: the makers of prednisone specifically say not to give the drug in the presence of a fungal infection, which is what Valley fever is. When combined with prednisone, fluconozale can interfere with adrenal gland function. Fluconozale has a variety of baleful side effects, all of which appeared in the dog. By the time I unilaterally took her off the drug, it apparently was too late to save her from those effects.
Yesterday out of curiosity I looked into the question of whether adrenal tumors and dysfunction could result from an infectious agent. She does sleep on my bed, and as a matter of fact I’ve been feeling fairly shitty of late, myself. Yes, I find, that is possible, but it sure as hell isn’t likely.
However, what should I stumble across atScience Directbut this interesting statement:
It is noteworthy that a major category of antifungal medications, the azoles, can adversely affect adrenal function presumably via liver cytochrome P450-mediated interactions. In particular, the inhibition of CYP3A4 (the most abundant cytochrome P450 in humans) significantly impacts steroid catabolism.133 The most potent antifungal that inhibits the P450 system is ketoconazole (an azole that currently is infrequently used in the USA and Europe), but adrenal insufficiency can occur during the administration of other azoles.134, 135, 136, 137 Additional important inhibitors of the P450 system include antibacterials (such as macrolides and isoniazid) and antiviral agents (such as ritonavir and delavirdine). Hence, clinicians should carefully consider the potential risks associated with the use of an azole or other medications that affect glandular function in patients at risk for, or with suspected or proven, adrenal dysfunction.
SON of a bitch!
This pretty much fits the bill. New Vet remarked that her liver is somewhat enlarged. And yes, Cassie surely IS “at risk for, or with suspected or proven, adrenal dysfunction.” She’s at risk for two reasons:
And then of course we have number 3: evidence of an adrenal mass seen in an abdominal ultrasound.
Okay. It’s probably unreasonable to expect a vet with a busy urban practice to be aware of an obscure study that appeared in 2014. BUT… Putting her on a powerful drug with nasty side-effects in the absence of proof that the dog had the disease for which the drug was intended? Not a good idea. The Valley fever test came back negative, which is not proof that his shoot-from-the-hip guess was wrong. But…if we’d waited four weeks and then tested her again, it probably would have shown positive if she really had VF. Which, in my opinion and in the ever-so-much-better-educated opinion of New Vet, she does not. Even if she did, a more conservative approach wouldn’t have harmed her significantly.
She no doubt did have the adrenal tumor. But like most such growths in aging dogs, it was asymptomatic and probably would have remained so until she died of something else. Now, though, we learn that the fluconozale very likely activated or aggravated a condition that was quiescent.
So in fact what we have here is an iatrogenic ailment that almost certainly will kill the dog within the next few weeks.
I don’t even know how to say how furious this makes me. Poor little Cassie! She was a healthy, active, middle-aged dog one day; a week later she was an elderly, sick dog.
