So after seeming toget better for a few days, yesterday Cassie the Corgi essentially crashed. This poor little dog is terribly sick. She’s not coughing as much, but her breathing is labored and she’s distant — “foggy” is the word for it. Yesterday for the first time she seemed less than interested in food. And she’s barely moving around. At times she appears to be in pain.
Last night I thought she might pass in her sleep, but no. Actually, I kind of hoped that would be the case. If it were me and I could lay me down to sleep and never wake up, that’s the way I’d want to go. This morning she’s still with us, just. But she’s immobile.
So, pretty clearly, tomorrow I’ll have to call the vet and arrange to have her put to sleep. If she lives that long.
Isn’t it odd how the most difficult crises invariably occur on the weekend, when there’s no way to get help? You get sick, the dog gets sick, the cat gets sick: everyplace is closed. When I called the vet’s office yesterday (Saturday morning), a recorded message told me to call one of those chain “emergency” veterinaries. Those places charge you $1400 just to walk in the door.
And y’know…after spending $1,000 on the present crisis, I just don’t have $1,400. That’s more than my monthly income. It’s well over half of what I have to live on per month. And no, I’m not charging my dog’s demise on a credit card.
Cassie the Corgi: still alive. Vet whose diagnosis I question thinks she has maybe another three months. Could be. She has her ups and downs…except…with each passing day she has more ups than she has downs.
She’s definitely not cured. Still coughing out of the blue…as just now: she’s just sitting there and hoff hoff. Yet before, she couldn’t bark without falling into a coughing frenzy. Now she barks, as before, constantly — and pretty much cough-free.
So I had this idea of tracking her ailment in Excel. Score symptoms on a scale of 1 (terrible) to 10 (back to normal). Observe result:
Hmmmm…. So what we have here starts on September 28 — about three weeks after this doggy ailment began, or at least after it registered as a serious problem in the human’s estimation. She’s really sick at that point and has been for awhile. About the 26th is when I take her off the fluconazole (the fungicidal Valley fever drug) that has made her very sick, indeed. By the 28th, she’s still incontinent, unable to eat, almost inert. Late in the day on the 29th, she revives. Then the next day she shows signs of a UTI…not just incontinence but blood in the urine. She has lost a lot of weight. I continue to dose her with Temaril-P, which contains prednisone; she continues incontinent. Incontinence is a side-effect of prednisone. But she starts to eat as the effects of the fluconozale wear off.
On the 4th I take her off the Temaril; on the 5th the new vet says the urinalysis shows the dog has a UTI; the original vet says the test doesn’t show anything very serious, but the new vet begs to differ, remarking that the numbers are as high as they can get. Vet 1 wants me to put her back on the drugs. I demur. She continues to cough and wheeze, but once regaining her appetite eats robustly. On the 7th I finally decide to cut back the Temaril and on the 8th have the idea of trying Benadryl. At that point she improves significantly, even attaining to a “10” a couple of times. I start the new vet’s doxycycline for the UTI on the 13th (it takes that long to get the results of the urine culture), and on the 14th she hits a “10.” She relapses on the 25th but then rebounds on the 26th. Today her condition has been mixed but never much below an “8.” That, I would suggest, is one helluva lot better than the scores of “1” that occurred on the 30th, the 3rd, and the 5th. She has a coughing spell at 4:00 this morning, but otherwise has been at the 8 to 10 level all day.
So…what? She seems to be trending better despite an occasional backslide. But does that mean anything? If it does, what does it mean?
Well, I guess all this comes under the heading of “we shall see.”
Meanwhile, pool guys have been in and out all week. They spent a full day jackhammering off the plaster. And the better part of half another day cleaning layers of calcium scale off the tiles….
A-N-N-N-N-D HOLY Shit!
Ruby just had a reverse sneeze episode while she was inhaling her doggy dinner and started choking on her food. I had to run to the kitchen (where she’s fed separately from Cassie to keep her from grabbing Cassie’s food) and for GODSAKE had to apply a Heimlich maneuver to save her little doggy life!
IS this EVER going to stop?????????
Well, she seems OK now. They’re both OK now. For the nonce.
Yes. So. The pool guys. The tiles look essentially brand new. I’m really glad I didn’t have them removed and replaced. They not only look great, of course they’re very mid-century modern. Perfect.
And to gild that lily, the guys who came in today succeeded in replacing and reviving the line that will allow me to attach Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner to a pipe in the wall, instead of having him occupy the skimmer inlet. This means that as leaves and flowers are blown into the pool and settle on the water’s surface, most of them will be sucked into the skimmer basket rather than falling to the bottom to be vacuumed up and inhaled into the filter. And that means the filter will stay cleaner a LOT longer and will run a LOT better.
In the course of chatting, I remarked to one of the men that I consider the pool very easy to care for. He said this will make it even easier to take care of. Most of the time, all I’ll have to do is keep the chemicals balanced.
Now that is an amazing concept.
Here’s how the giant bathtub looks at this stage:
And here’s how the not-yet-deceased damn-near-choked-to-death puppy looks just now…
Man! I have been so stunned by all the sh!t that has come down during the past two months from Hell — week after week after week in which every single day has brought some new nightmare — that I just completely let the budget go. There’s a limit to what I can think about, and I’ve been way past that limit for a long time.
By today, though, things have been quiet long enough for me to catch my breath and try to figure out how much this has cost. And how I’m going to pay for it.
•The cost of the vet bills alone has come to just about $1,000 since September 15. •As of October 21 — with 10 more days to run this month! — I was $575 in the red. •I retrieved $381 from Social Security by cutting the planned monthly transfer to Emergency Savings by about 60%; this left me a mere $228 in the red.
With 10 more days to go in October.
Yeah.
And that was extremely lucky: no large bills to repair the car after the fender-bender, thanks to Chuck’s guys wrestling and bolting the thing back into place, and because by some miracle I didn’t have to replace tires.
A thousand bucks on the dog in six weeks. Think of that!
Dare one speculate that a substantial part of that resulted from a wrong diagnosis? Well…probably not. We really don’t know whether Cassie does or does not have Valley fever. She may. But she’s one helluva lot better than she was, that’s for sure. Not back to normal. But not stepping over Death’s threshold, either.
There’s money in savings to cover a couple hundred bucks’ worth of red ink. Just. There’s no way I can sustain even one more unplanned expense. And Christmas, obviously, is now a lost cause.
God only knows what the potentially life-threatening skin cancer diagnosis will cost me. Despite the supposed joys of Medicare and Medigap, there’s always some amount that isn’t covered. Where the cash will come from to pay those bills, I do not know. Out of investments, I expect.
One message from this: unless you still have a job in “retirement,” you can’t afford to keep a pet. So forget that. After Cassie and Ruby are both gone, there’ll be no more doggy companionship.
A little quieter here today… let’s hope it’s not the calm before the next storm. Let’s see how the various crises are doing:
1. In the department of Funny’s Money: I have no idea. I don’t even want to know, it’s such a chaotic disaster. This month I never got an untrammeled moment when I wasn’t too exhausted to sit down and work on the budget, so I’ve just been spending left and right. Financial manager sent over enough to cover the down payment on the pool rehab, which starts Monday. I reset the checking-to-emergency savings automatic transfer to move less than half of what I originally thought I could manage, so that (at least) will leave a little more basic survival money in checking.
2. Hand cancer: still waiting on the biopsy. But I’m calling the doc’s office on Monday to ask if we can accelerate the process. I want this damn thing OFF. Where they shaved off enough to send to the lab, it’s growing back with élan. Whatever it is, it’s very fast-growing and so presumably aggressive. And at times it really hurts. Hurts and itches. Turns out pain and itching are defining characteristics of squamous cell cancer. Why exactly we have to wait for biopsy results until the cows come home to cut the thing out escapes me.
3. Dog decedence*: No credible sign of croaking over yet! Matter of fact, this dog is getting much better. Just now she remembered the chicken jerky treats that reside in a jar on the kitchen counter and decided to do the Dance of the Manipulated Human, thereby eliciting a chew treat for herself and for Ruby. The cough seemed to come back a little: it had subsided to the point where she coughed only when she slurped up a lot of water (which she’s always done…corgis do that). She had stopped coughing when she barks and stopped coughing when I lifted her off the bed. So I cut back the Benadryl from 1/2 tab in the morning and 1/2 tab in the evening to just 1/2 tab at night. A-n-n-d…the cough started to come back. This morning I gave her a dose at doggy breakfast, and lo! No coughing.
*Yes, yes, I did invent that word. Why do you ask? Etym: Late Modern English, from decedent (a deceased person)
4. Car: It seems to have survived its brush with the flatbed trailer with no very serious damage. The gouged tire is still rolling. It hasn’t blown, at least not so far…and yeah, it has been on a freeway or two. I’m trying to stay off the freeways, because I don’t trust the thing. But to get out to the new dermatologist’s office sometime before the end of my life expectancy, I pretty much have to ride the 101 for a number of miles. So far, so good.
5. Cord-cutting Cox escape: Last night La Maya and La Bethulia invited me over for dinner. In the course of conversation, I remarked that I need to get rid of the fake “land line” (Cox’s new version is really VoIP, and not very good VoIP at that), replace my extensions with cheap clamshells and get an iPhone.
“I have two old iPhones that I’m not using!” says La Bethulia. “Want one?”
Do I want one???? Grab! Well, she quite reasonably wanted to delete all her data on the thing before I trot it over to the Apple store to get it set up. And they’ve forgotten the password for the thing. But it turns out it’s not hard to reboot the thing all by your little self. So…I may try to do that with my son’s help, or just hire an Apple tech to do it. Paying someone a hundred bucks or so would be a lot cheaper than buying a new iPhone! 🙂
6. MacMail fiasco: Still not fixed. Right now the only way I can get to my email is through the Web interface, which is less than ideal. It does allow me to access incoming mail, but all my carefully designed preferences have been screwed up. Not erased — which would have been far preferable — but all jumbled around. So it’s a mess. And I guess I’m going to end up either having to pay Cox for an email account, the bastards, or start using Gmail, which I really really REALLY do not want to do. This, I will figure out later.
7. Other little dramas: Have yet to decide whether I’m going back to choir. The associate director has kindly put me on the women’s chant choir, which I love. She urged me to come to choir on Sunday despite having turned on my heel and marched back to my car and gone home after last Wednesday evening’s unpleasant exchange at the door (not with her but with a woman who makes no secret of her dislike of me).
I don’t know. I’d pretty well decided to quit — just never go back, that’s how disgusted I am. And besides…
Really, the only thing that keeps me from feeling a great deal more serious about moving out of Crime Central is the choir. I can’t afford any other close-in district — this neighborhood is cheap because Conduit of Blight Blvd, Gangbanger’s Way, the Blightrail, the meth clinic, and the population of bums keep the property values way down. Comparable homes anywhere else are at least a hundred grand higher, and these days more like two hundred grand.
Abandoning the choir and the church would open two housing options: Fountain Hills, wayyy on the east side of the Valley, and Sun City, wayyyy on the west side. Both have the advantages of low crime rates and pretty decent nearby shopping. They’re both quiet and peaceful, and there’s no way any politicians and their greed-driven backers are going to build a boondoggle through the middle of either one. Sun City is a ghetto for old folks, which I really do not like. Fountain Hills is one helluva long way from everything but the Mayo Clinic, a distance that I also do not like. I don’t know anyone in Fountain Hills and, because I don’t make friends easily, this would make me feel isolated and unhappy. But Fountain Hills has pretty scenery and it is close to upscale shopping and to my favorite second-hand store, My Sister’s Closet. Sun City has the advantages that it’s very cheap to live there, and that I do know some people there and so would start with a kernel of a social life. Which would be good. I guess. And the writer’s group I favor meets way on the west side, so it would be easy to cultivate more friends there. I guess.
Well, if I’m going to snab that phone, I need to get up and do it now…La Maya’s relatives are about to descend on the house. And so, away!
Cassie the Corgi started to fall sick about the first of September. Migawd! It’s the 18th of October now…that poor little dog has been ailing for over a month and a half!
However…it looks like she may be on the mend. That is, if you assume that whatever is growing on her adrenal gland is benign.
Since it won’t do her or me any good to know what exactly that is — because of course I can’t afford thousands of dollars on surgery and cancer therapy for a 12-year-old dog — we are throwing the dice and betting on the come: that the thing is one of the 50% of such growths that are harmless.
She’s acting like that now. She finally has recovered from whatever ailed her and the horrific drugs that made her even sicker than the ailment did. Her cough is about gone except for when she drinks water…but she’s always choked on water, long as she’s been living here at the Funny Farm.
And this evening, for the first time in all these weeks, she’s been up for a beloved doggy-walk!
We didn’t try to go far — about a third of a mile, maybe — and she was looking a little tired by the time we got back. But it made her and Ruby the Corgi Pup very, very happy.
She’ll have to work back up to the traditional mile-long speed-walk. It may be that she’s a little too old for a fast stroll, but I’m pretty sure she’ll eventually get to where she can at least amble through our usual circuit.
Will she live a lot longer? In human years, I’d bet not. She is, after all, an elderly dog. At 12, a medium-sized dog has supposedly aged as much as a human ages in 69 years. But we don’t know she’s only 12. That’s what the Humane Society said was her age. But too often the staff at rescue shelters just make a guess at a dog’s age. When she came to live at the Funny Farm, she certainly didn’t act any younger than two. She could have been three. Ruby is around four, and I’d say she behaves very much like Cassie did ten years ago.
So…if Cassie was three then, she’s 13 now. If she was four then, she’s a very elderly 14 now. It’s hard to tell with a corgi: they’re vigorous, sturdy dogs, and Cassie was born before the breed was “noticed,” so is not overbred. If we cast our imagination to the outside border of this speculation and allow that she could even be 14, that would give her a human age of 78.
I’ll be happy if she lives another year or so and does so without undue suffering. And at the rate she’s going now…I don’t think that’s outside the realm of reason.
Today — Monday — nothing on the calendar. Thank God. With any luck, no lunacy will occur today.
Cassie the Corgi is getting a lot better. She was already throwing off the cough when Second Opinion Vet put her on doxycycline for the urinary tract infection MarvelVet opined was negligible. Whether the antibiotic is making a difference, I couldn’t say…except since she’s been on it, she’s improved markedly. This morning she endured being lifted off the bed without a coughing frenzy. It looks a great deal as though she’s going to recover and also as though the alleged adrenal tumor was something I didn’t want to know about. Or need to know about: at 12 years of age, this dog is going to pass on to her furry fathers pretty soon, and something has to spirit her away. If that’s the something, then that’s just the something, and there’s not much anyone can do about it.
Late last night, I remembered that you can polish grocery-cart scratches off your white car with one of those wall-scrubber sponge things. Duh! Why did I not think of that before? So I ran out to the garage and tested it, and lo! It did rub off some of the lesser “scratches,” which actually are paint from the flatbed. There are a couple of real-life gouges in the bumper’s paint, but most of it is not gouges but black stuff scraped ON to the finish, not scraped into it. It was dark out there last night, of course. Whenever I get my act together this morning, I’ll try this by light of day and an open garage door.
The car is running fine. Its bashed tire is not going flat.
Speaking of flat, I’m flat broke, budgetwise, and the economy, as predicted by a certain skeptic of your acquaintance, is about to go down the tubes. But what the heck…it’s not the first time. 😀
I still do not have a new AMEX card. Looks like the post office once again delivered the mail to Manny’s house: Manny and Josie live one street to the north. Stupidly, our streets bear the same name, and so postal workers and various service persons routinely go to the wrong address. And Manny will NOT forward misdelivered mail! They just throw it in the garbage, far as I can tell.
So now presumably the garbage scavengers (of which we have a-plenty) have had access to my name, address, and a brand-new AMEX card. 😀 Today I have to call American Express and get them to send me a new one. Again. Meanwhile, I still have no credit card!
Nor do I have a card for my Medigap insurance. Today I’ll have to jump through that set of punch-a-button hoops, too. Together, those will absorb some time and create some more unwelcome aggravation. Oh well.
Speaking of unwelcome aggravation, the alleged squamous cell carcinoma is looking somewhat better today. I suspect Young Dr. Kildare’s pronouncement — that I have skin cancer, not ringworm — was yet another misdiagnosis. It takes about two weeks for the antifungal cream to kick in…and last Friday was the start of Week 2. It may be that not enough time had passed, by the time I saw YDK for the gunk to start to work. Last night I was NOT awakened at three in the morning with frantic itching and burning. And the lesion looks less inflamed than it did. In the “looks” department, I have to say it sure does look a lot more like images of tinea manum (ringworm on the hand) than like images of skin cancer. They are, in some ways, similar. But…well…we shall see.
In exploring the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest That Is the Internet, I learned that an outbreak of ringworm can be brought on by prolonged stress, which can weaken your immune system.
That would explain a lot, eh?
Coccidioides…the causative organism?
And speaking of aggravation, I remain convinced — nay, I’m more and more convinced — that MarvelVet misdiagnosed Cassie grievously — and possibly deliberately. I think this dog picked up whatever bug was going around, the one his staff told me at the outset she probably had and for which they originally prescribed the Temaril-P, which acts as a cough suppressant. I never did learn what that bug was…whether it was viral or bacterial. But its signal characteristic was a cough. Cassie may not have thrown it off as fast as expected because it either progressed to a bacterial infection or started as one.
She was slowly getting better by the time 2Ovet prescribed an antibiotic for what she says is about as bad a UTI as a dog can get. But two days on doxycycline and voilà! The cough has subsided to the point where she no longer hacks and wheezes when lifted off the bed and even sometimes can drink water without choking and wheezing. Doxycycline is a broad-spectrum antibiotic — meaning it acts on the two broad classes of bacteria, gram-positive and gram-negative. What this means, if my speculation about the cough is correct, is that it would attack the cause of the cough (assuming it’s not viral) as well as the cause of the UTI.
There are some serious risks to broad-spectrum antibiotics. On the other hand, there’s a serious risk to pneumonia, too…
I wish I were not such a damn cynic…but I am. I cannot get past the suspicion that the “misdiagnosis” I sense was deliberate misdiagnosis. MarvelVet’s claim that Cassie’s UTI was negligible and did not need to be treated was just plain false. I saw the results; the numbers were as high as they get. The dog had a serious UTI, and that is why she was bleeding into her pee. He may have realized that treating her with an antibiotic likely would clear up the cough. And that would take me and my dog and my credit card out the door.
Valley fever is a huge profit center. The cost of treating the disease is bracing, and the treatment goes on for a minimum of six months but often for the remainder of the animal’s life…which can be years. One of my friends, who says she’s lost four dogs to Valley fever, said she was spending $300 a month on the drugs. MarvelVet has a link to a compounding pharmacy (a remark he made suggested he owns it or has an interest in it), and so he was giving me a month’s worth of pills for $40. But…either way…just think of that.
At $40 a month, that’s $480 a year. Just 10 doggy patients diagnosed with “Valley fever” — correctly or not — will bring you $4800 a year. But if you can get $300 a month, that’s $3600 per patient per year, or $36,000 a year if you can diagnose 10 dogs with it. Holy shit! That doesn’t even include the $500 he charged for the tests.
MarvelVet has a large, active practice — he is a very busy man, indeed. And one could argue that he’s so busy that of course he makes an occasional mistake with an off-the-cuff diagnosis.And you certainly could figure that 10 cases of Valley fever would be on the low end for that practice.
I’d like to believe this was a mistake. But…man! The money motive is there, in a big way.
As for the adrenal tumor? Well…the dog is 12 years old. She’s not going to get out of this world alive. She’s near the end of her breed’s average life span. It would be surprising if she didn’t have some life-threatening ailment.
Just now, though, she surely isn’t behaving as though her life was threatened. Half of adrenal gland growths are benign. So she does have a 50-50 chance of staying well. At least for awhile.
So after seeming to get better for a few days, yesterday Cassie the Corgi essentially crashed. This poor little dog is terribly sick. She’s not coughing as much, but her breathing is labored and she’s distant — “foggy” is the word for it. Yesterday for the first time she seemed less than interested in food. And she’s barely moving around. At times she appears to be in pain.
Man! I have been so stunned by all the sh!t that has come down
