Thanksgiving: Great! Wonderful afternoon with my son’s excellent friends, their beautiful children, their charming grandparents. Wish I could socialize with these folks 365 days a year.
Dog: Still alive. More or less.
Paying work: Some pending but none active, thank God.
Phones: Blissfully silent!
The NoMoRobo system that Cox finally, after years of lobbying, made available to its customers has been in place for two days. And it’s been two days of peace and quiet! One, count it (1) scam call got through, this one with one of the weirdest Caller IDs I’ve seen. On two lines:
V123119420100687
1602875-9937
The second line evidently is a spoofed local number. The top number is emitted by a system called “V-dialler,” commonly used by crooks. Why it wasn’t blocked? Possibly because the series of figures represents a kind of time & date stamp (down to the second), which would mean there would many thousands of V-numbers to get registered in the blocking system. At any rate, that particular series got sent off to NoMoRobo. Unknown whether that’s useful, but typing the figures into NoMoRobo’s web form takes all of about 30 seconds…so, voilà.
Another nuisance call came through at ten after 9:00 this evening. It was intercepted. The bastards call at all hours, so the fact that the call is intercepted and forwarded after one ring is a problem: it doesn’t stop them from jangling you up, interrupting whatever you’re doing or even waking you out of a sound sleep. You could probably stop that simply by turning off the ringers on the phone (though I don’t think mine can be completely turned off). But that would mean you’d miss calls from friends and family, unless people could be trained to speak into your voicemail and wait to see if you hear and pick up.
The little dog survived Thanksgiving Day. Most of today she’s been sorta OK, though in the last hour or so she’s had some slippage. She just walked over to the chair where I’m sitting and fell down. And now she…what? She gets up, walks into the corne3r, and appeaers to be lost. She’s sniffing the floor like she’s trying to track something. And there she goes dowbn the hall, fo0llowed by a very puzzled Ruby. I’d better get up and see what’s going on now.
….
Hmmm… Having some kind of episode. She’s very weak. These passages come and go, evidently in response to the emanations or not of the adrenal gland’s hormones. Now she’s shivering. Poor little beast.
Carried her out to the backyard, where she peed and then fell over trying to take a dump.
So, however you look at it, the future is brief for this little dog. We can let her limp along, I guess, as long as she has more good days than bad. That, I expect, will not be for much longer. This is the second day in a row when she’s had an episode that brought on collapse or near-collapse.
…
But it’s late. I tire. Tomorrow is another day. I guess.
Never fails, does it? All real emergencies, terrors, clogged drains, and minor inconveniences invariably happen on a holiday. Or, at best, on a Sunday.
Not so reliably on a Sunday, though: too many resources are open and available on Sunday.
But Thanksgiving? Christmas? The Fourth of July? Ohhhhh yeah! Whatever can go wrong will go wrong…on a major holiday!
Early this morning the dogs and I climb off the bed. Cassie seemed OK but tired, which wasn’t surprising because we spent yesterday evening at my son’s house. She doesn’t sustain even the most routine exercise well anymore: lately, if I try to walk her around the corner and back — about a tenth of a mile — she tires but seems OK. But the next morning she seems exhausted.
When she walked outside to do her thing, and I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. But within the hour, she couldn’t stand up to eat her food. She just stood over her dish, shaking all over. She seemed almost paralyzed: couldn’t or wouldn’t walk, and though she was sort of standing, it was more like huddling upright. I had to lift her onto the doggy bed pillow, and then position her so her nose would not be pressed into the stuffing and suffocate her. Even reclining, she continued to shake all over and she seemed unable to move on her own. It was almost like she’d had a stroke.
My son and I are supposed to go to our friends’ house for Thanksgiving dinner. This, we might add, is a bit of a BFD.
So the emergency vet’s receptionist said the wait there right now is several hours. And how much does a trip to the emergency vet cost? “A hundred dollars.” And that is just to walk in the door.
If Cassie is dying, I figure she might as well die here as there.
But now I don’t know what to do about the Thanksgiving thing. I hate to leave her here to die by herself. But…on the other hand, I don’t know that she will die today. She has her ups and downs (though rarely as extreme as this). This isn’t the first time I’ve thought she was on the way out. Apparently these swings are a function of the adrenal gland tumor. Weakness, shaking, collapse, lack of energy, panting, rapid breathing are all symptoms of the thing. So, we might add, is “symptoms seem to come and go.”
There isn’t much I can do for her except let her rest. And frankly, other than putting her down right now, there’s not much a vet can do for her, either.
So I’m sitting there on the bed e-mailing this intelligence to my son: writing her obituary, as it were. And I hear {click click click click} up the hallway. Ruby is standing right there, so it ain’t her. Cassie has managed, somehow, to pull herself to her feet and she’s staggering up the hall toward the kithchen.
She’s walking and she’s stopped shivering all over. And…next thing y’know, she eats a whole plate of dog food..
Well, she staggered outside briefly. Then disappeared. Had to set Ruby to searching for her, which is a trick because one thing a corgi ain’t is a search dog. I’ve worked on the “find” command with that mutt until I’m blue in the proverbial face, and she still only vaguely gets the idea.
Found the patient inside, again unable to walk, shaking again. Picked her up and carried her back to the dog bed. She’s resting and has stopped shaking, at least as long as she’s reclining.
Okay, let’s try to think rationally here.
She doesn’t appear to be in much discomfort, except that she’s too weak to walk. That she ate an entire serving of dog food indicates that she’s not in a lot of pain.
I’m going to have to have her put to sleep in the next few days or, at most, weeks.
Therefore it doesn’t make a lot of sense to rack up a bill of hundreds of dollars to take her to an emergency vet.
Nor does it make sense to spend all of Thanksgiving Day sitting in a veterinary waiting room for something that ultimately can’t be helped.
If she’s going to die today, my being here will not change that.
But she’s probably not going to die today, given that she was able, eventually, to get up and eat, and given the pattern of ups & downs.
Unless things change a lot for the worse, I think I could safely go to our friend’s house. There’s little or nothing I can do for the dog here.
Next week, though, I’m afraid it’s going to be The Time. If she doesn’t pass through the veil today, I’ll have to take her up to one of the vets tomorrow or Monday.
This Event will present a whole series of new decisions:
•Do I get another dog?
If so, what kind of dog?
From where?
• Do I stay here in my house, or move away from the recrudescent Tony Situation?
If I’m right about what Tony is up to (let us hope not!), then I will need to get another German shepherd or similar protective, aggressive dog. There’s a reason I didn’t replace Anna with another GerShep: I’m too old to train and handle a large, high-drive dog safely. This fact inclines us to say “move away.”
• If I move, where do I go?
• Some friends are trying to sell their two-bedroom patio home, by way of moving themselves into an upscale old-folkerie. It’s a nice little house, centrally located, and I would buy it but for two things:
§ One of the reasons they’re moving is that they have a certifiably lunatic neighbor who has made a lot of trouble for them. Out of the frying pan, into the fire!! § It needs about $15,000 worth of renovations.
• Well. And there are some other things:
§ It’s two houses in from Central Avenue, a noisy main drag. § It’s in an HOA. I do not want to deal with an HOA. § The little development borders the canal, which is a superhighway for drug-addicted bums. § It’s within (loud) earshot of Sunnyslope High School, where the band practices and football games blast forth during the fall semester. § They’re asking more than it’s worth, IMHO, especially given that it needs new flooring, a new security gate in front, new landscaping, a gate on the west side through which to roll the garbage can by way of keeping the peace with the crazy next door…and on and on.
•For what I can pay, that leaves either Sun City or Fountain Hills, neither of which are within reasonable driving distance of my life.
If I stay here and Tony starts to do his thing again — frankly, I’d put money on it that he’s up to just that — then I will need to get a dog that’s big enough to be some protection. That represents a) expense and b) hassle. I’ll also need to add to the armory: really, I need a shotgun, because I’ve become too goddamn lazy to drag the pistol to the range and practice.
A new shotgun will cost several hundred bucks…as nothing compared to the cost of moving. I have some friends who are into armaments and so may be able to find someone who knows someone who’d like to sell Dear Old Dad’s heirloom. Unfortunately SDXB has already unloaded (heh) his. But a few hundred dollars is, indeed, as nothing compared to the cost of moving.
I might be able to get an older, fully socialized GerShep from the German Shepherd rescue. But that poses its whole new set of questions:
• How will Ruby take to a new room-mate? •Given enough provocation, will this proposed GerShep exterminate Ruby? • The German shepherd’s lifespan is nine to eleven years, during which one can expect to have to deal with some very expensive ailments. Do I really want to do that again? For a dog that I may have for, say, five years at the outside?
Is that soap opera still extant?Days of Our Lives… A fine time-waster, right up there with Facebook and Twaddle and Google News. 😀
So here’s a question: how do dogs KNOW you’re touching food when they’re around the corner and cannot see you, and when you have not introduced any new food smells into the environment?
There are only two possibilities: either they can hear your fingers moving or they have dog-lepathy. My money is on the second: the beasts can read your mind faster and more accurately than a mosquito can. And as anyone who has ever tried to swat a mosquito senses, few creatures are more telepathic than those bugs.
At breakfast time I usually set a small package of blueberries on the table, first because I like to munch them and second because I use them as high-quality dog treats. This morning after sponging a few of those and a few pieces of kibble (also used as bribes), Ruby retreats to the kitchen, there to perform the wacky little dance she uses to lobby for a higher-value treat: to wit, a strip of chicken jerky. The human is not getting off its duff: the stubborn creature persists in chowing down on its own food while reading the current issue of TheEconomist and ignoring the puppy.
With Ruby out of the line of sight on the far side of a set of kitchen cabinets, the human reaches for a blueberry.
Like a SHOT the dog is at the table, the familiar look of expectant joy beaming from her furry little face.
HOW DID SHE KNOW? I didn’t touch the plastic. I’m wearing nothing that can rustle with movement, and even if I were, how would she know what movement was made? I have not bitten into the berry and so have not released any delicious parfum de myrtille.
Really. Seriously. There is no other explanation than dog-lepathy. The damn dog reads minds.
Cassie the (Ailing) Corgi seems…sorta OK today. Not so very bad off. Not so great. Both hounds are both off snoozing just now. Just as with cats, dog life seems to consist mostly of lobbying for food, eating, and sleeping.
She coughed a little this morning, so I sprang the Robitussin DM on her. That was a trip! 😀
Go ahead…just TRY to dose your dog with red-dyed artificially sweetened goop flavored with essence de faux fraises! You never saw so much red sticky stuff all over the floor since the time you dropped a mixing bowl full of freshly mixed cherry Jell-O on the floor when you were eight years old!
She just walked in to deliver some barking. And happily enough, she can bark without falling into a coughing frenzy now. That surely is some kind of progress. She’s looking more and more emaciated, though, which is progress of a different sort, I expect. In a different direction.
The other day I was wondering when it was that I first noticed Cassie was beginning to take on the old-dog look. And lo! WordPress conjured the answer at the end of yesterday’s whinge, in the list of “related posts” it automatically generates. It was just short of a year ago: late December, 2017.
Cassie came along in June of 2008, at which time the Humane Society claimed she was two years old. Those rescue society estimates are usually pulled out some volunteer’s tail end, so anything’s possible…even the possibility that she was more like three. Until very recently, she’s been exuberantly healthy, so it would be easy to figure she was younger than she might have been. But by last December, she was starting to take on that “old dog” look, graying a bit around the schnozz, beginning to look a little sunken around the eyes. If she was sick, though, it didn’t show in her behavior.
Next year is 2019. So if she lives that long — and if we believe she was two when I got her — then she’ll be about 13 next year. That is longer than any of my canine room-mates have ever held forth, with the possible exception of Greta the GerShep. I guessed Greta was about seven when I inherited her from the neighbors. But those people were exceptionally feckless. My guess assumed they got her when she was a small pup, but neither of her adult humans was competent to train her as smoothly and perfectly as she was trained. Greta, of course, was a genius among dogs. But even geniuses must have some sort of learning curve. She could have been a year or two old when they got her from someone who knew what they were doing, in which case she was well over 12 when she shuffled off this mortal coil.
But otherwise, I’ve never had a dog live longer than 12 years. One died of a spinal tumor. Others just expired when they reached what for a large dog is old age. Anna was a wreck when I finally dragged her into the death chamber. And I’m afraid that will be true of Cassie, unless we’re lucky and she dozes off into the other world during the night.
The weather is beautiful. I should go out and buy a flat or two of flowers. But of course that would entail getting up and moving around.
Yes. Walmart, bless its corporate heart, managed to bring a quick, neat end to what started out as a Day from Hell, morphed briefly into a sad but real Day from Heaven, and then began to slide downhill again.
Cassie the (Ailing) Corgi had a pretty good day yesterday — at some moments possibly even rising to a 10 on a scale of 1 (about to expire) to 10 (back to normal). Foolishly, I thought, oh gosh! she’s gonna be OK!
You’d think I’d know better by now, wouldn’t you? 🙄
Beginning about 1 in the morning, she started coughing again. And coughed the rest of the night away. By morning she was so exhausted she was immobile.
I call the New Vet at 8 a.m., the instant they open.
In the interim between the time the dogs and I roll out of the sack and the time I can reach the vet, I pick up the laptop and, in the course of glancing at the news and waypoints, visit a complicated draft “page” at Plain & Simple Press where I store material waiting to publish it. Yesterday I spent HOURS updating and fully formatting it, an endless, tedious, mind-numbing job.
This morning? It was A.L.L. G.O.N.E.
Yes. Hours of brain-banging work, disappeared. And no, I couldn’t retrieve it for love nor money. But there wasn’t much time to fret about it…
The vet’s staff asks me to bring in the dog at 8:45.
This was pretty tight because I had to sing at a funeral at 10. And this was not one I was about to miss, since it celebrated the life (and presumed afterlife) of a lovely friend.
Okay. Brush teeth. Wipe off yesterday’s make-up. Throw on some fresh make-up. Lift the dog into the car, where she collapses in a limp pile. Fly through the rush-hour traffic, to the extent that one can fly through such a thing, and make it with eight minutes to spare. Time ticks by as the vet and I and her underlings discuss. It’s pushing 9:15. I still haven’t fed Ruby and still am not dressed in the requisite black duds and still have a half-hour or more to get back to the house and another 15 minutes to get down to the church. Nor, we might add, have I had breakfast or even so much as a swallow of coffee.
Seeing that I’m getting anxious, they suggest I leave the dog at their clinic, where they will test her again for the alleged, never-proven Valley fever and test for heartworm, which can cause the same kind of coughing, lassitude, exercise intolerance, and bloating. At this point, the new vets persist in the theory that the problem is not the diagnosed adrenal tumor but in fact is yet-to-be-provable Valley fever. This is entirely possible: dogs frequently test negative on the first try at Valley fever testing. It has, however, been more than 4 weeks (by far) since the first effort, so if she does have the disease, by now she should test positive. They want to put her back on fluconazole. I tell them I’d rather put her down, it made her so sick. They propose another concoction that has even worse side effects.
I fly out the door and arrive at the funeral rehearsal right at 10 a.m., to the director’s surprise (since I’d emailed her that I’d be late). On the way there, I reflect that she was also taking prednisone during the last go-round with fluconazole. Prednisone had some mighty baleful effects on the dog. It occurs to me that there could be some drug interaction.
The funeral comes off very lovely. Dear friend and leader on the choir who just had hip surgery showed up and, amazingly, managed to get up the stairs and participate in the whole ceremony. Old friends who have been off the choir, beautiful voices, also attended: a joy to sit with them and listen to them sing again.
Later, when I get back to the house, I look the drug interaction question up and discover — from Pfizer, the horse’s mouth — that discontinuing fluconazole causes increased metabolism of prednisone, which leads to adrenal insufficiency. Which would explain quite a lot…possibly we could try the fluconazole in the absence of prednisone to see if it will go down any more easily.
Along about 3 p.m., I get back to the veterinary. Cassie is barking and looking pretty perky. WTF? She was at Death’s Door in the morning…I had to carry her through the house to the car and then carry her from the car in the vet’s door.
They did another chest X-ray, since they never were able to extract the image I paid for from MarvelVet. They also did a heartworm test and sent off for another Valley fever titer.
However, it’s beginning to look like the dog probably does not have Valley fever. The white area around the lung and heart that MarvelVet cited as proof of his hypothesis was gone; the sound of her chest has been clear for several weeks, and still is. New Doc believes the problem is and has been a bronchio-pneumonia, probably of bacterial origin because the doxycycline we gave her for the UTI she developed seemed also to help clear up the cough…and doxy is the drug of choice for doggy pneumonia.
Unfortunately the doxy made the dog so sick I had to take her off it after 19 days (of 21 prescribed). She thinks, though, that the dog may be on the mend, and she’ll be OK if we can soothe the cough.
So she suggests Robitussin DM, in a dosage she specified.
As for the adrenal tumor, this new intelligence just in:
New Vet doubts that any of the dog’s symptoms have been caused by the adrenal mass, which the sonogram doc believes to be nonmalignant. New Vet says most adrenal tumors in dogs have no symptoms (this is not altogether accurate, but let’s put our money on it for the moment.)
She thinks the bloat probably originated with the prednisone, which should not have been given in conjunction with fluconazole.
Other more classic fluconazole side effects, including anorexia and stupor and obvious misery and diarrhea and labored breathing, were caused by…yeah: fluconazole.
Taking her off the prednisone without titering her off even more slowly than I did would have caused adrenal symptoms, and giving fluconazole at the same time as prednisone can cause adrenal insufficiency that may or may not go away in the absence of the drugs.
Read: we’re talking about an iatrogenic problem aggravating a misdiagnosed ailment…
She doesn’t seem to have an explanation for the extreme swings in the dog’s well-being: yesterday Cassie was at a 9 or even a 10 on the 1-10 scale; this morning she was back down at a 1 or 2.
The dog does not have and probably never has had a collapsed trachea.
So…if our furry friend picked this up while nosing around in the grass during a doggy walk (which is how such infections spread among dawgs), I guess I should feel lucky Ruby didn’t get it, too. Actually, Ruby did cough some, very mildly and for just a few days; she may have had it and thrown it off because she’s so much younger.
This poses the possibility, though, that Cassie could recover. Maybe.
Now, as for that Robitussin DM: for veterinary purposes, the stuff has to have 20 mg of dextromethorphan and 200 mg of guaifenesin per 10 milliliters of sauce. Ohhkayyy…
So I figure I’ll trudge down to the Walgreen’s, stand in line till the cows come home, ask a pharmacist to direct me to the correct concoction, and…ugh, how awful does that sound?
Why do that when I can order it up from Amazon?
Right.
Right?
R-i-i-g-h-t.
Amazon offers approximately 87 gerjillion variants of Robitussin DM. The only one that has this particular proportion of active ingredient-to-active-ingredient-to-inactive-ingredients comes in “prepackaged spoonsful.”
Say what?
I do not want spoonsful, prepackaged in plastic waste or not. This stuff has to be hoovered up into an oral syringe so it can be squirted down the hound’s gullet.
Now in the middle of evening rush hour, whereinat you can not turn east out of my neighborhood because of the effing stupid “reverse lanes” the city has inflicted on us, I set out for the nearest Walgreen’s, which rests near the corner of GangBanger’s Way and Commuter Nightmare Parkway East. This, I dread, because I’ve been harassed in that store’s parking lot before and do not look forward to more harassment. The other nearby Walgreen’s is here in the ‘hood — couldn’t pay me to unlock my car doors in front of that place, especially not at dusk. The third Walgreen’s is way on down East Commuter Nightmare Parkway; though I can turn into its parking lot (where I also have been harassed), turning out of it in a direction that will bring me home is, shall we say, highly problematic.
O shit o hell o damn i do NOT want to do battle with any one of those dreary Walgreen’s.
But…right about then it dawns on me that I don’t hafta. There’s a Walmart on the way to Nearest Walgreen’s. It’s on my side of the road (no illegal or risky left turns across torrents of traffic) and its exit guides me straight to a left-turn lane that sets me on my way home, via Gangbanger’s way. Hot dayum!
Get into Walmart. It’s crowded — I have to park a long way from the front door. This — crowdedness — is a good thing, because drug-addicted panhandlers tend not to pester anyone when there are a lot of people in the parking lot. Into the store without incident. Quickly snab a fine young pharmacist; tell him the challenge. The kid is ready to rise to it. We sally forth into the cold nostrum aisle, and darned if he doesn’t find a version of Robitussin DM that comes close to the required proportions.
I say this is 20 mg of dextromethorphan and 200 mg of guaifenesin to 20 milliliters of sauce, not to 10. He points out that the solution to this is simply to give the dog twice the suggested dose.
Yeah. Well: we do have the possibility that a rushed vet could have the proportion wrong.
I say the solution is even simpler: give her the suggested dose and see if it works. Often OTC stuff like this will work with less than the recommended dose. If it does: bully. If it doesn’t, so then I just give the second half of it. He allows as to how this is an acceptable plan.
I grab the dope, head for the door, and in spite of a hectic scene find a cashier standing there all by his little self. Pay and shoot out the door without having to wait a minute.
Traipse to the far end of the crowded parking lot: not a single panhandler in sight. Yes!
Well…the (formerly) Fatal Vet Appointment got put off till mid-afternoon, because they had entered the Doomsday Appt in their calendar as the 19th, not today (???????? Not easy getting competent help, is it?). Can you imagine how I would have felt if I’d shown up there at 9 this morning expecting to shove Cassie’s raft out to sea, only to be told wooopsie! come back next week!
Argha.
At any rate, I took both hounds up there to get their claws clipped at the same time I confer with this vet about Cassie’s fate. Because it’s been almost three months since either of them has had a walk on asphalt and concrete (which keeps their claws sanded down), they both had scimitars sticking out of their toes.
So along about 2:30, it was off to the vet on the northeast side, a little easier drive than the junket to MarvelVet’s and, as I’ve designated her in my mind, an opportunity to confer with a source for a second opinion.
This vet felt Cassie was, of course, on the decline, but not as bad off as the Senior Drama Queen has thought. She thought it was best not to subject the dog to any more treatment, since it seems that Cassie is even more hypersensitive to drugs than her human is. She got her hands on the report from the guy who did the ultrasound, who also works for her practice, and said it indicates the little pooch does have a large growth on her adrenal gland but it probably is not malignant. That notwithstanding, the dog does have Cushing’s disease (a manifestation of the tumor’s interference with the adrenal function). She certainly thought the dog’s days are numbered, but not in the single digits. When I remarked that MarvelVet estimated she has about 3 months, she visibly restrained herself from wincing and then said she does not emit predictions of life expectancy because the risk of being wrong is extremely high.
She also thought it was a positive sign that in Cassie’s ups and downs, the ups tend to return to 9s and even 10s, if for brief periods.
She did a fairly involved inspection of the dog’s joints and concluded that she has arthritis in her hips and shoulders and that probably explains a) her tendency to drag me backward while Ruby drags me forward and b) the episode of obvious pain that occupied several days earlier this week.
They clipped the scimitars off both dogs’ feet. Ruby, still being mostly a puppy at heart, is always effervescent and so if this made a difference to her, it was impossible to discern. Cassie seems A LOT cheered by being able to walk around more comfortably. So presumably those claws’ deforming her gait contributed to her arthritic discomfort. Just now, despite a long car ride, a mildly stressful vet visit, and a long wait in the car while I made a run on the mega-Fry’s at Tatum & Shea, she seems pretty perky (comparatively). She’s barking conversationally, walking around, merrily crapping on the flagstones, and in general appearing to still be alive.
MarvelVet may be right about the 3 months. But that’s a lot different from 3 days…
Tomorrow I’m going to start trying to walk Cassie just a few yards up the block in back; then retrieving Ruby and doing the regular 1-mile walk with her. The vet didn’t think Cassie would ever get back up to a full mile-long junket but thought she might be able to build back up to a block or so. She thought this might help her.
Two funerals in the past week or so, and now we have to sing at another on Friday.
California is burning down. Friends who live near or in the fire areas are, if not fleeing for their lives, in an uproar of terror for those whose lives are being upturned.
Yesterday I made an appointment to take Cassie the Corgi in to the vet to be put to sleep. Monday morning. She was in such bad shape she could barely walk, and could not step up over the threshold of the back door without being lifted over it.
Forthwith my son appeared, to argue against it. She was in such terrible shape, though, that I couldn’t take very seriously the argument that she might not be so bad off. He actually offered to pay the $1,000 it would cost to do surgery to remove the supposed tumor on her adrenal gland (without realizing, I think, how complicated and iffy that surgery is).
But…
But today, she’s sprung back! The limp is almost gone (she’s always had a little limp, but yesterday she was crippled). She’s barking again. Though she still has a bit of a tragic expression and she’s still bloated (a sign of Cushing’s disease), she seems relatively…cheerful, I suppose. She’s about 80% of normal.
So…now I don’t know what to do. It’s possible she was injured…maybe her back got twisted while she was being lifted onto and off of the bed. Or maybe something happened that I didn’t observe.
If she continues at 80 to 90 percent, I suppose on Monday I’ll have to cancel the appointment. Or maybe take her in and ask the vet if she can come up with something to treat her. There are a couple of drug treatments for Cushings that can extend a dog’s life. But they have nasty side effects that probably will make her plenty miserable in their own right. So…what? I substitute one horror for another? Why?
Meanwhile, the effort to freeze the supposedly benign tumor off my hand seems to have failed. It’s healed up and the scab has fallen off and it still itches frantically. At night along about 1 or 2 in the morning it starts burning, awakening me with pain radiating up the arm. Lovely. So I guess we’ll have to jump through that hoop again…or actually do surgery on it, after all, which probably is what should’ve been done in the first place.
So here’s a question: 
Cassie came along in June of 2008, at which time the Humane Society claimed she was two years old. Those rescue society estimates are usually pulled out some volunteer’s tail end, so anything’s possible…even the possibility that she was more like three. Until very recently, she’s been exuberantly healthy, so it would be easy to figure she was younger than she might have been. But by last December, she was starting to take on that “old dog” look, graying a bit around the schnozz, beginning to look a little sunken around the eyes. If she was sick, though, it didn’t show in her behavior.