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Dispatches from Hell…

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Day after day after day after day has been yet another Day from Hell, lo! these several weeks. Why don’t things get better? Why does everything break, bust, explode, crash, or die? Finally figured out the explanation. These are not days from Hell. We are actually in Hell. Hence: these are not blog posts. These are Dispatches from Hell.

Case in point: The least of today’s hassles, only because it’s a hassle left over from a week ago…I’ve tried twice to re-up my subscription to The New York Review of Books, one of my favorite broadsides. First time was my fault: I used the credit union’s bill-pay function, but paid for it from my personal account (which, oddly, did have the the NYRofB’s listed as a previous payee). Of late I’ve been making the S-corp pay for it.

That payment bounced. Why, I do not understand: what do they care which account pays for it? Ohhkay… Eventually they sent a desperate “Don’t Leave Us” ad in the snailmail. I replied to that by filling out the form and entering the S-corp’s AMEX account number. This no doubt would have worked if I hadn’t indulged in a moment of stupidity.

As you know, the ‘Hood is not the best of all possible neighborhoods. We’re inundated with drug-addicted transients, who support their habits with petty theft. Including mail theft.

The payment envelope in hand, I raced out the door to run a bunch of errands and get someplace on time. In a hurry, I really did NOT want to drive to the Post Office to deposit the thing in one of their mailboxes. That would entail waiting half my lifetime for the blightrail signal at the interesection of Conduit of Blight and Feeder Street E-W to turn green, then waiting the rest of my lifetime to get back across the damn blightrail tracks to get to my various destinations. So instead of traipsing to the PO for this one small item, I stuck it in the outgoing slot of the Fort Knox Mailbox and flipped up the red flag.

Bad move. Very stupid indeed.

Two or three days later, I went out to get the mail (it’s almost all advertising now, so there’s no hurry to pick it up) and noticed the red flag was still up. Whaaa? Did the mailman not come by? (He often doesn’t….)

Check to see if he’s failed to pick up the outgoing: no envelope in there. Days go by. A couple weeks go by. No payment at NYRofB’s.

Shit. That means someone has stolen the thing and now has my name, the name of my business, its address, and its AMEX credit card number. I wait a few more days to see if the payment goes through. Today I call NYRofB’s phone reps and they say they never heard of it. I need to pay the thing on my corporate AMEX card over the phone. Then I need to cancel the card and order a new one, ASAP.

But ASAP ain’t very AS…because I’m waiting on the PostalPerson to deliver a new personal AMEX card. Yes. Somehow I managed to LOSE a whole cardholder full of cards!!!! The personal AMEX card, the Safeway card, the new Medicare card with a new Medicare number on it (the one that doesn’t work at the pharmacy), the old Medicare card bearing my Social Security number….GONE, every one of them.

I believe they’re somewhere in the house, because I paid the AC guy to fix the thermostat and the leaking roof with my personal card, and I did not leave the house between the time he drove off down the road and the time I realized I couldn’t find that cardholder. Since I’ve habituated that locksmith for a good 12 or 15 years and Steven (locksmith dude) has worked for them for 7 years and he’s a fine upstanding workingman, I don’t believe he walked off with it. Without a doubt, I set it down in the house somewhere and managed to lose it…same as the pair of prescription glasses that got tangled up in a knitted bed throw and disappeared for three months.

Fortunately I have photocopies of the Medicare cards. And fortunately, I had the sense to black out the SS number on the old Medicare card. The AMEX card has been canceled and a new one is on the way, but the weekend coming up, I don’t expect “tomorrow” (no kidding: that is what she said!) to arrive much before Monday. And fortunately, my debit card, corporate AMEX card, and Costco cash cards are in a different card holder. Which is not, after all, lost. Yet.

So what other dispatches from Hell since I had to pay $40 out of pocket for a flu shot?

  • The dog got better off the fluconazole, then worse.
  • Dog continuing incontinent, I ask the new vet if they’ll test her urine for a UTI.
  • Wednesday after volunteer receptionist duty, I race the refrigerated pee up to 40th Street and Thunderbird and drop it off there. I drive up there through the rush-hour traffic, drive back in even worse traffic. Changing lanes to maneuver into place to turn right into the ‘Hood, I misjudge the length of a flatbed trailer being towed behind a pickup in the lane next to me and clip the goddamn thing. The driver doesn’t even blink. He doesn’t slow down, he most certainly doesn’t stop…I think he may not even have noticed that I bumped his trailer. My car sure did, though. Pulled over to find the front bumper was half pulled off, scratched and gouged, flying in the breeze. Shee-ut!
  • Back here, I walk in the door and find…NO Charley! He’s freaking GONE! A worker has been here in the afternoon; I’ve left strict orders not to let that dog slip out the back gate. But he can go in and out the dog door…dollars to donuts that’s exactly what he’s done. He’s old, he’s sick, and now he’s LOST. Try to reach said worker: no answer. Totally, utterly panicked. My son is supposedly in Colorado, which is why his dog is here. I think maybe he got back while I was out and picked up his dog, but he won’t answer his phone, either. Neighbor texts him (I have no cell phone). No answer. I am in utter despair. After a bit I calm down enough to notice that even though the dog’s food is still sitting on the kitchen counter, the dog’s leash and collar are gone. SOMEONE took the dog on purpose…at least he’s not roaming around the neighborhood and ambling across Conduit of Blight Boulevard.
  • Eventually the kid calls and says yeah, he picked up the dog but was too tired from driving in from southern Colorado to bother to leave me a “thanks for keeping my dog” note.
  • Now late for choir, I feed the dogs and fly out the door without any dinner of my own.
  • Get home about 9:15 p.m. and go to enter the (locked) office.
  • It’s been raining for a day and a half. The solid-core door is swollen tight. The key goes in but I can’t turn it. I get a wrench, try to open the thing, and…SHEAR THE KEY OFF level. with the fucking deadbolt! All my computers, all my financial stuff, all my credit cards, all my cash, even my cheesy little clamshell phone are locked behind that door.
  • Call the locksmith’s emergency line. He says he’s sure he can fix it. For a hundred bucks he’ll do it right now (pushing 10 p.m.). I say if he’s sure it can be opened, I’ll be able to sleep at night and so can wait till tomorrow. Otherwise I’ll be wanting to break the front window and climb in to get my computer, which I’d druther not do.
  • Next day have real difficulty getting them to come over — but because I’m an old customer who’s spent a lot of dollars at their shop, they squeeze me in.
  • Steven comes over, takes a screwdriver to the thing, flips out the stump of the key: takes him all of 30 seconds. I’m in love. This love affair costs me 70 bucks. And now I have to go take the fancy key over to the shop to get a new one made. That’ll be another 20 bucks. Later. But not much later.
  • Somewhere in here I lose my credit-card holder. I search from pillar to post, empty out the trash cans, go through drawers, look under the furniture: no luck. I’m sure it’s in the house, probably, but when I can’t find it the next day figure to be safe I’d better cancel the AMEX card. Two or three days without a personal charge card. Yeah.
  • Insurance guy says I’m in luck. Because he bought me a “prime” policy, I have a one-accident-no-fault deal: get out of jail free. AND because I haven’t tried to kill any of my fellow homicidal drivers lately, I also have a zero deductible. He asks me to get estimates from a body shop but suggests that if it doesn’t cost much it may be better to foot the bill and not let the company know about this little fender bender. My son, also an insurance guy, recommends taking the money and running: he thinks I should go to the best body shop in town (which is 20 miles from my house) and have them do a decent job fixing it.
  • The vet’s office calls to say something’s out of whack with Cassie’s pee and they want me to bring her in Saturday morning. I say “wrong”? Like what? Well, like it might be a UTI. Ooookayyyy…
  • I take the car to my mechanic to check for damage under the hood. They find no structural or engine damage, AND they manage to wrest the bumper back into place and secure it with the car’s clips and a few extra bolts. It now looks dead normal except for a scrape on one side, as though maybe I got too close to a guard wall. The men of Chuck’s Auto also opine that it would be best to hide this incident from the insuror. However, they do find a nick in the tire’s sidewall and recommend replacing the tire soon.
  • I call my insurance guy with this report and with the advice from my son. He reiterates that his thinking coincides with the mechanics’ but he will support me whatever I decide to do. (He’s not a sales agent: he’s a broker.)
  • Cassie seems to be getting better. By yesterday I observe that she’s about back to normal and surmise I must have been right that she didn’t have Valley fever.
  • At 3:30 this morning she wakes up and pees in the bed before I can set her on the floor. In doing so, she manages to miss the double layer of pee pads I’ve laid down on the bed: three more loads of laundry!
  • In a flash I haul off the sheets, the bed pad, the blanket, and the dog blanket. Fortunately this five-layer barrier keeps the dog pee off the mattress. Dazed with exhaustion, I toss the sheets and blanket into the washer and start the thing running.
  • Cannot sleep, so go back to reading 8000 words of Korean-accented scholarly writing.
  • Somewhere in here it dawns on me: this lesion that developed on my hand, the one on the same arm that got the ferocious Shingrix shot, is not a zoster pox. Noooo….Y’know what that is? THAT little fucker is ringworm. Look it up and find ringworm image after ringworm image that looks just like it. And ringworm being not a parasite but a fungal infection, y’know what the treatment is? Ohhhh yes! Fluconozale, the same damn stuff that made my dog so sick I thought she was going to die! TWICE!
  • Shit. Well, you can get a topical treatment over the counter. The standard course of treatment, if you believe the Internet (yeah!), is first to try to get rid of it with an OTC ointment. If that doesn’t work, then you move on to poisoning yourself.
  • Eventually I go out to move the bedding from the washer to the dryer and…can you guess? Somehow I’ve missed two of the pee pads! The inside of the washer is now chuckablock full of shredded, wet puffed-up paper stuffing crap! HOLY shit!!!!!!!!!
  • I go inside to finish reading the client’s paper.
  • Eventually go back out to the garage. Realize I can’t put this stuff in the dryer. Haul each piece out into the driveway and shake, shake, shake, shake, snap, shake, snap, SHAKE, shake, shake. This covers the driveway with snow-like stuff but doesn’t get all the crud off the bedding. Hang the sheets, blanket, and mattress pad on the clotheslines, hoping most of the rest of the stuff will shake off when it’s dry.
  • Clean out the washer. Yeah, right.
  • Take the shop-vac to the washer. This clogs the shop-vac but apparently gets most of the crud out of the washer, except for the stuff I have to dig out with a coat-hanger wire. Use the rest of the vacuum’s capacity to pick up the white snow off the driveway and the garage floor.
  • Haul the vacuum tub and two baskets of garbage out to the alley trash bin. On the way, pick up a bum’s fast-food cup out of my yard. On the way, observe that the mess the city water guys made of my front landscaping is pretty well fixed, after I shoveled and broomed gravel back in place. Hope they didn’t fuck up the plumbing under there. But don’t have much hope.
  • Brush out and wash the shop-vac’s clogged filter; set it aside to dry.
  • Finish the Korean professor’s paper. Interesting guy, interesting subject. Learn a lot about international law on freedom of expression and journalistic privilege. That’s good, anyway. Run it past a prospective intern, am impressed with the kid’s response. Ship the edits & clean copy back to the client.
  • Decide I cannot bring myself to do the Costco run that was planned for today.
  • Realize that isn’t gonna do me any good, because I still have to go out to a Walgreen’s and try to find the anti-fungus stuff (miconozale) to treat the frantically itchy lesion on my hand.

And so, away. Let’s see what I can do to my fellow homicidal drivers on the way…

From Bad to Worse…

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Okay, so…This gets better and better.

What we have here is a dog that’s been pounding on Death’s door for the past two weeks. Pee pads all over the floors, because she’s only marginally continent.

So there’s the underlayment of “bad.”

Moving on toward “worse”:

Vet decides the dog has Valley fever: puts her on a drug that nearly kills her. I take her off the drug, but continue with an antihistamine-con-prednisone, which seems to soothe her some. She improves.

Vet remains convinced that the problem is Valley fever, even though we have no empirical evidence to prove it. He wants to see her at 8:30 Sunday morning. I have to be at choir at 10 a.m., and it’s a half-hour each way to the vet’s office.

Saturday we have a half-day choir shindig. During the five-hour absence this engenders, the dog pees and craps all over the family room. The pee pads worked…but…hell.

No, I can’t leave the dog outside in 100-degree heat. And now it’s raining: no, I can’t leave the dog outside in the rain.

Dog is better, but far from dancing on the top shelf. I learn to bribe her to eat by doping her food with baby food. This works, within limits. She still is obviously pretty sick. Is she on the mend? Maybe. Or…is she just showing the salutary effect (highly temporary) of the antihistamine/corticosteroid combo?

Haven’t gotten any writing done: missed the whole week’s worth of posts at P&S Press.

Sunday morning my son shows up to drop off his dog — the dog that can not ride in a car without having a nervous breakdown — so that he can drive to Colorado to visit his 104-year-old grandmother. He appears as I’m trying to bolt down breakfast before I have to leave for the vet, hoping that if I can just get fed and get my makeup on and my hair up, maybe I’ll be able to race direct from here to the church and get there in time for the 10 a.m. rehearsal.

In the ensuing chaos, of course, I get neither painted nor combed.

Off to the vet, who is kind despite little-womaning me and who suggests I bring her back on Tuesday for a full-body ultrasound scan, which he will deliver gratis. I don’t feel I can turn this down despite my nagging suspicion that this is a device to pull me into still MORE fabulously expensive treatment on this poor old dog, whose time would be about here even if she did not have some as-yet-undiagnosed ailment.

Fly home, drop the dog in the house, paint my face, slap up my hair, and fly out the garage. Turn the corner and…my hair falls down. Park the car and struggle until I get it back on top of my head — have NO idea what it looks like except that it undoubtedly is not good. Shoot into the choir room right at 10 a.m.

Sit through a long, VERY high-church service. You’ve heard Episcopalians are a dime short of Catholic? That’s wrong. We leave Catholic in the dust.

Okay. It was a very beautiful, very affecting, and amazingly wonderful service and I wish we could do those all the time. Our musicians leave everyone of any persuasion, religious or otherwise, in the dust. 🙂

Drive to AJs, buy enough tomatoes and stuff to cook up some pasta for lunch. Having had it, buy a four-pack of Guiness. So much for that damn wagon!

Race home. Pick up the soggy doggy pee mats. Clean up the dog mound that by now has glued itself to the floor so that I have to soak it loose by covering it with a paper towel saturated in Simple Green and letting it sit.

Fix a pretty damn good lunch/dinner. Consume two of the beers. Feel richly justified in doing so.

Fail to get much else done yesterday.

Rain starts to fall. Charley, who’s not too bright. likes to stand in it and then track in fresh mud. In the middle of the night, he goes out through the dog door and forgets how to get back in. I have to roll out of the sack, track him down through the downpour, and coax him back into the house.

Today: Wake up, as usual, around 4 a.m. AC is pounding away. I think I hear the motor shut off upstairs, but…the fan keeps running.

And running. And running. And running…. WTF?

Get up, stumble down the hall, and try to figure out the hated Nest contraption. Finally ascertain that even with the unit shut off, the fan continues to run. Nothing that I do will shut off the effing fan.

Get on the phone to the Nest people; reach a tech in Idaho. Nice thing about Google is they make their people work 24/7. Great place to work, eh?

With him directing my sticky little fingers, I fiddle around and fiddle around and FIDDLE around. I want my Honeywell old-fashioned mercury-driven no goddamn digital crap REAL THERMOSTAT back. Nothing works. I draw the line when he asks me to go out in the rain (it’s pouring), shut off the breaker switches, and fool with the wiring in the thermostat. I say I’m calling my AC guy. He resists — they do NOT want other techs fooling with their equipment. I say I am not fiddling with the wiring in this thing. He says if I’ll let him know when the guy gets here, he’ll get on the phone with him and coach him. And if we do that, they will cover the cost of the service call. I do not say I have a service contract, which may or may not cover this antic.

I get off the phone with this guy, having failed in every way to shut off the fan, along about 5:40. At ten til 7, the fan finally shuts off on its own.

No wonder, I think, noooo wonder my AC bills have been so high: the damn thing has been sucking hot air into the house whilst trying to cool the interior air 20 degrees below the ambient temperature,.

At 7 a.m. I reach the AC company. They call back to say one of their guys just walked in the door and they will send him over to work on my fiasco before he starts his full (!!) day of jobs.

I email the Nest/Google guy to let him know, as instructed, that the AC dude is on his way.

Cassie, having been made to choke down a quarter of a blue pill with a chunk of the present pork chow, is unhappy and can’t get through the whole dish of food. I decide to try one of the cans of PD MarvelVet foisted on me. Fake stew.

The stuff stinks to high heaven. Charley and Ruby fly into a BERSERKER ecstasy at the first whiff. Fight my way into the back bedroom, slam the door on Ruby and Charley, set the dish down in front of Cassie.

She sniffs at it tentatively, refuses to get up out of her reclining-Sphinx position. Takes a bite. Stands up and starts scarfing. She inhales the stuff, which leaves the bedroom stinking like an abbatoir.

She now has consumed two full meals, one of home-made dog food and one of made-in-China foodoid. This is good because she’s lost so much weight her spine is sticking up.

Meanwhile, I realize we’re almost out of said home-made food. Good GOD I don’t want to drive back down to the AJ’s in the rain to buy a roll of Freshpet dog food. Fortunately, one package of chicken thighs is left over from last month’s Costco run. Get that out to start defrosting it. I figure starting this evening I’ll spike her regular ration (1/4 pound) of real food with a half a can of commercial food, and in the interim give her a half-bottle at a time of the baby food I bought to lure her into eating her regular food.

Quarter to ten: AC tech shows up. Never did hear anything from Nest’s precincts. Wouldn’t matter anyway: our guy has been trained in the Nest and knows how to fix it. He takes the thing apart and discovers…the wires are wet!

Holy sh!t.

Onto the roof with our guy. He finds the wiring is sun-rotted and a mess, and the low-voltage stuff has worked loose where it enters the attic. He rewires the unit, gets the system to working fine again. Seals up the open-air feature as best he can with a LOT of silicon (it’s supposed to keep raining through Thursday) and says to call a roofer and get him up there to seal that thing up good with tar.

That’ll be two hundred dollah, please!

So much for this month’s budget. Which was overdrawn anyway…

He mentions that they’re looking for an office lady to answer the phones, book calls, and do some light bookkeeping. That would allow me to pay bills like this and even buy an iPhone. I think about it. 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. My favorite hours, actually, for an 8-hour day — I used to work that shift on my first job and loved it, because it left a bunch of time before everyone else got off work to run errands and generally enjoy life.

On the other hand…it’s..{choke gag!} a JOB. Don’t much like the idea of leaving the dogs (possibly singular) alone for 8 hours at a time. And…truth to tell…I don’t wanna work anymore.

Speaking of the which, in the middle of all this my beloved Korean journalist emailed: would I edit an 8,000-word paper that needs to be at the publisher by Friday?

Should I say no, given the madness ongoing?

Did I say no? Not on your life!

On the way out, AC tech leaves the gate hanging open. Ruby somehow slips out the front door and escapes! I do not notice this. The AC guy has to turn around and go back out rather quickly, and when he does so he spots the dog. She bounds over to him and he captures her. That’s a God’s miracle…under normal circumstances that dog would be half-way to Yuma by now.

He is so distracted by the corgi sideshow — as am I — that he forgets to pick up the $200 check I was writing as these antics were under way. He leaves the premises unpaid.

Today I have to try to figure out if a payment I made to renew the New York Review of Books has gone astray and an AMEX charge account number stolen. I paid through bill-pay but, in the glory of its new Web interface, the credit union screwed up and bounced the payment. So I used a renewal form, charged it to the corporate card. I did not have time to drive this piece of paper to the Post Office — normally I would go in person to the PO to mail anything even remotely financial. In a hurry, I decided to take a chance and put it in the outgoing slot in my mailbox.

Error…error…error….

Day or so later, I notice the mailbox flag is still up. WTF?

Often the mailperson doesn’t even bother to come down our street, especially if the only thing to deliver is trash. So I figure he probably didn’t come by, so I’d better retrieve the thing and carry it to a post box.

Empty. SOMEBODY has picked up the envelope. But if it was the mailindividual, s/he should have pushed the flag down by reflex. We get as much mailbox theft here as we do car break-ins and petty theft from yards, so the natural thing to surmise is that a meth-head ripped it off.

Another day or so later I checked AMEX online. The charge hadn’t gone through, but neither had any unauthorized charges. Today I have to back into that thing and try to figure out whether the drug pushers have got my credit-card number. Shit. I should’ve known better.

Phone rings as I’m sitting here typing this. 800 number. Eff you!

<click> <click>

I really need to get rid of this land line and replace it with an iPhone. But that will require some concentration and a lot of time to learn to use it. And hassle. Lots and lots of hassle.

Thank goodness there are two more beers in the fridge! 😀 If you can’t see the sun through the clouds, do you have to wait till it’s over the yardarm?

Dog: Can’t win department

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Or is it the Department of Little Women?

I do have the worst feeling I’m being little-womaned here. But on the other hand, one also has to admit that the vet is emitting every sign of trying to be helpful…many of which signs are above and beyond the call of duty. But…but, indeed… Read on:

So at 8:30 this morning — Sunday — I present myself and my dog at the office of the charming and genuinely concerned (I do believe) MarvelVet. I explain that the dog has been much better after I unilaterally took her off the fluconase, a drug for Valley fever. She has begun to eat again, and she’s acting more like her old self: shaking off the deathly lethargy and resuming her favorite barking habits. The cough is gone.

He remains convinced that the dog does have Valley fever. That may be true. But in the absence of empirical evidence, my stand is that we have no proof of it, and that we’re making her unnecessarily sick by giving her a drug whose side effects include complete inappetence, extreme thirst, uncontrollable incontinence, lethargy, loss of interest in surroundings, inability or unwillingness to move around, diarrhea, vomiting, and gastric distress.

He now says, “Those are symptoms of Valley fever.”

I say, “That is a list of fluconase side effects that appears at the University of Arizona Medical School’s web page.” He replies with the usual snort that you can’t believe anything you read on the Internet. I reply that the University of Arizona Medical School is a credible source.

See? That is little-womaning: the assumption that if a woman says something, it must be stupid, uninformed, or both.

So used to that kind of male behavior am I that it doesn’t especially bother me — beyond the obvious annoyance factor. What does bother me is that those are NOT the symptoms of Valley fever, nor are they the symptoms she presented with. I took her to the vet because she had a persistent cough, not because she was peeing on the floor (she was not), consuming undue amounts of water (she was not), off her feed (she was not), lethargic (she was, to a degree), or suffering diarrhea or vomiting. This circumstance presents one of two possibilities:

  1. Either he doesn’t know the difference between the symptoms of Valley fever and the side-effects of a powerful medication; or
  2. His mind is made up and he simply refuses to listen to what the little woman has to say.

He proposes to have another vet, who’s a specialist, do a full-body ultrasound of the dog, in hopes of getting to the bottom of the problem. He says he will arrange this at no cost to me. Tentatively now, this is slated for Tuesday.

Okay. If he’s being honest, this could be useful.

Or not.

I am very wary about it. Why?

For one, the Mayo Clinic states — in reference to human cases, as you might expect — that the best course of action for Valley fever is usually no action: rest and hydration is the recommended treatment.

Most people with acute valley fever don’t require treatment. Even when symptoms are severe, the best therapy for otherwise healthy adults is often bed rest and fluids — the same approach used for colds and the flu. Still, doctors carefully monitor people with valley fever.

And then over here at Medscape, we have this statement about work-up (i.e., testing and physical examination) for Valley fever:

Because most patients recover spontaneously, pursuing documentation of coccidioidal infection is not imperative unless the patient is immunocompromised or has signs of severe progressive disease or dissemination. Diagnosis requires isolation of the organism in culture, identification on histologic specimens, or serologic testing.

[Medscape is a website for physicians and clinicians. You have to subscribe to get the full dope on most topics.]

At this time, the dog does not have signs of severe progressive disease or dissemination. To the contrary, she’s showing every sign of improvement.

In any event, does this strategy apply to dogs? I truly do not know. However, I see that the University of Arizona’s website invites questions…and so… Yes. I just sent off a query asking if dogs respond differently to Valley fever infections than humans do….and specifically asking whether those two blurbs of advice apply to dogs. Watch this space for a report.

My friend whom I quoted as having lost three dogs to Valley fever says she actually has had four die of the disease. Each time she spent phenomenal amounts of money trying to keep the dog alive. One dog was on medication for years…and the stuff was costing her $300 a month.

Three hundred dollars is my entire household budget, exclusive of utilities.

Valley fever represents a huge profit center for the veterinary industry. Says the UofA Med School: “Owners spend hundreds to thousands of dollars each year, especially in Arizona, diagnosing, treating, and following up care for their dogs with Valley Fever. It is estimated that valley fever costs all Arizona dog owners at least $60 million per year.”

Holy sh!t. No wonder the guy wants to get the dog on fluconase, proof that it’s needed be damned.

He told me to put her back on the stuff. I said if we were going to do that, it would be better to put her to sleep, because it makes her so sick that she effectively has no life. This was when he tried to tell me the side effects were Valley fever symptoms — even though it’s dead obvious the dog has none of the “symptoms” now that the drug is wearing off. He backed down when I said I would put her down before I’d give her any more of the stuff.

I did have to point out to him that with a Ph.D. and a job as a technical editor, I do know the difference between a university medical school’s data and a woo-woo web page. It’s hard to convince some people. 😉

He tried to tell me she was not behaving in a normally peppy way. I refrained, having already said quite enough, that at 12 years of age a dog is not supposed to be peppy.

He handed me, also free, a half-dozen cans of PD and urged me to feed it to her. For those who aren’t into long-term pet ownership, PD is short for “Prescription Diet”: it’s a spectacularly expensive dog food distributed exclusively through veterinaries. He thought it would help her feel more like eating. And it’s true, she does need to gain back some weight.

But…BUT… She’s regained her appetite and is now eating just fine. The baby food scheme worked to jump-start her eating. After I got her eating that stuff, I poured half a bottle of it over a regular plate of her food, and she inhaled it. And this evening? During the battle to feed Charley, Ruby, and Cassie without being tripped or pounced by any of them, I forgot about the baby food whilst struggling to get her and a plate of food behind a door where Charley and Ruby couldn’t grab it. She inhaled her dinner anyway.

And PD…hmmm. It’s distributed in New Zealand. Know what that means? It means it’s likely made in China. They are very secretive about where the product is manufactured — can’t even find a clue at the venerable Dog Food Adviser watchdog site. If they’re not telling you, they don’t want you to know. Eh?

Her cough is essentially gone. She chokes on water — as she always has (the pup does, too: it seems to be characteristic of corgis) — and that causes her to wheeze, but once that passes, she no longer is coughing. That suggests to me that it’s every bit as likely that she had bronchitis as that she has Valley fever. Maybe more likely: she wouldn’t get over the cough that quickly on just a few days of the poisonous “cure,” and it would have come back by now if she really hand VF.

He noticed she was breathing rapidly, which indeed is something that she does. I couldn’t tell you if she’s always done it, because I haven’t been sensitized to the pattern of her breathing before this. However, here we have a genuine woo-woo Web page that suggests it’s no BFD:

Tachypnea is the term for rapid breathing in dogs and unless consistent or combined with other symptoms is usually nothing to worry about.

Laboured, difficult breathing or Dyspnea is more serious and you should consult your vet immediately as it could be the sign of a serious problem. Read on to find out…

Ohhkayyy…reading on: Potential causes:

• Heat.

• Nope: not while snoozing on a bed in an air-conditioned bedroom.

• Mitral valve disease

• Could be, I suppose. Cardiac problems have already been suggested as a possible cause of the coughing.

• Congestive heart failure

• Another strong possibility. Remember: she’s 12 years old.

• Cancer

• “However, lung tumours (Adenocarcinoma) are the exception and can cause coughing and panting along with rapid breathing. This form of cancer is more common in dogs over 10 years of age and could be the cause of older dogs breathing fast or more heavily than usual.”  Hmmmm…. Yeah, that’s a possibility. But MarvelVet said, when asked, that the X-ray he made showed no sign of cancer in her lungs.

• Anemia

• Usually caused by a hookworm infestation. Not likely in our parts: hookworm is not endemic here, and these dogs spend most of their time loafing in the house.

• Cushing’s Syndrome, which results from overproduction of cortisol caused by a benign tumor of the adrenal gland.

• Unlikely: she doesn’t have any of the other symptoms.

• Collapsed trachea, in which the tracheal rings begin to collapse, and as air is squeezed through, a characteristic honking cough results. This also can cause fast breathing while the dog is resting.

• Highly likely. The habit of choking when drinking water is also suggestive. And how is collapsed trachea treated? By golly: “Cough suppressants, bronchodilators, corticosteroids (to control inflammation), and/or antibiotics. In obese patients, weight loss helps decrease respiratory effort. Although treatment is not curative, a study released in 1994 showed that 71 percent of dogs treated medically showed a good long-term response.”  And what has caused Cassie’s cough and other symptoms to go away: Temaril-P…an antihistamine with a small amount of prednisone. Uh huh!

Why did I need to be told, eh?

Am I being irrationally paranoid about this? MarvelVet is a nice man, a visibly intelligent man, who seems to be genuinely, heartfelt concerned about the welfare of dogs and cats. He is an excellent vet.

Seriously: am I utterly off the wall to suspect overtreatment, a rush to possibly unnecessary treatment, and a strong money motive here? Maybe I’m too suspicious, too skeptical, too jaded after so many other experiences along those lines.

A little…doggy miracle?

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Just yesterday, you may recall, I again thought Cassie was pounding at Death’s door. She went in the closet and tried to hide in a corner (again). There wasn’t much I could do about it today: getting into the vet proved to be impossible around a two-hour  choir rehearsal followed by a lengthy special religious hoe-down.

During today’s long-distance sing-a-thon, I got an elaborate earful about Valley Fever from a friend on the choir who has lost three dogs to it. Spent the afternoon in a Holy Blue Funk, singing to God and His Archangels whilst contemplating the demise of my little doggie. Probably tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. sharp, when I’m supposed to show up at the vet’s doorstep.

But…then…on the way home, them thar Angels began to speak. Nay, even to break out into a little song of their own. And the verses went like this:

  1. When you called the vet about her cough, dear Estupida, the first reaction there was that she had a contagious bronchitis that’s been going around. They did not say whether they thought it was bacterial or viral, nor did they put a name to it. They only said they’d been seeing a lot of it, and then said “come get these blue pills.”
  2. The handy-dandy blue pills DID make it better. But when the cough hadn’t completely gone away after 10 days or so, Estupida, you called back expecting to cadge another bottle of blue pills. Instead they invited you and the dawg to make a trip across town to the veterinary.
  3. The vet opined that what ailed the dog was Valley fever, based on an X-ray that proves nothing. That X-ray could also image pneumonia or a bad case of bronchitis; it could also image a heart inflammation caused by heartworm, endocarditis, or congestive heart failure. Any of these would cause a severe cough. The blood panel came back negative for Valley fever but showing elevated values for a couple of measures that can be elevated by any kindof inflammation or infection. Yes, often VF tests do come back negative even in the presence of coccidiomycosis. BUT it is not unreasonable to suspect that such a test could come up negative because of the absence of coccidiodes. A second veterinarian at a different veterinary clinic suggested this and stated that she felt the test results were ambiguous and should be repeated after three or four weeks. So: we have no empirical proof that the dog really has Valley fever.
  4. Nevertheless, assuming the dog probably had VF, MarvelVet put her on a fearsome anti-fungal drug called fluconazole, which is nasty stuff with superbly nasty side effects. Within a few days of beginning this drug, the dog began to grow weaker and exhibit signs of failing health:

Total loss of appetite
Extreme thirst
Incontinence of Biblical proportions
Lethargy
Loss of interest in everything around her
Inability or unwillingness to move around.
Diarrhea
Vomiting
Gastric upset

ALL THESE SYMPTOMS are listed by the UofA Medical School as side effects of that drug in dogs: https://vfce.arizona.edu/valley-fever-dogs/treatment

And wouldn’t you know: she kept on coughing. By now she’d reached a point where every time she tried to drink water, she would choke on it and then start wheezing!

The blue pills are Temaril-P, which contains an antihistamine and some prednisone and whose purpose is to suppress coughing and reduce inflammation. When we took her off the Temaril, the coughing got worse. When we put her on the fluconazole, she got really, really sick.

Sooooo….this leads us to, goddammit,…

  1. What if the problem is NOT Valley fever? What if it isn’t any other fearful disease, either? What if the initial cause of the cough actually was the bug that was going around? She’s the same age I am in doggy years…and the last time I caught a chest cold, it took SIX MONTHS to shake the cough. Maybe the vet’s first guess was right, and it’s simply taking her a long time to get rid of the cough because she’s 12  years old.

Just now my money is on Numero 5.

Tomorrow I’m going to ask him to prescribe more of the Temaril and propose that we keep her on a low dosage for about ten days or two weeks. THEN wean her off and see what happens.

Whaddaya bet the pooch is still alive in ten days or two weeks? And still kickin’…or rather, kickin’ again?

So…what next?

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Okay, I know it’s utterly graceless to bring this up…but when Cassie shuffles off this mortal coil — which probably will happen within the next few days or even hours — then what am I gonna do?

Cassie had a very bad night — labored breathing, panting all night long (I know: I was awake listening to her). And she has decided eating is a thing of the past. She flat out refuses to eat. Yesterday I did get a 2½-ounce bottle of puréed baby-food turkey down her. But this morning, offered puréed chicken, she wouldn’t touch it. Even swallowing the mush seems to be difficult for her.

I’m trying to move tomorrow’s 8:30 a.m. veterinary appointment up to 11:30 this morning, which will mean I’ll miss the choir event I want to participate in this afternoon. My guess is the vet figures he’ll have to put her down, since nothing is helping her and I’m not in a position to spend thousands of dollars trying to revive a 12-year-old dog who’s probably on her last legs, no matter what we try to do.

For quite some time, I’ve had my eye on this dog. The rescue has had the pooch for awhile… And I do miss my German shepherds. That would be why I tend to revisit the GerShep rescue page. Do I want to apply for Lionel/Johnny? He’s a handsome fellow, about the right age, already house- and leash-trained. And white GerSheps tend to have better temperaments and overall better health than the horrifically overbred black-and-tan lines. No one wants white GerSheps because they tend not to bite and they’re not very threatening. 😉

Herein lies the issue: The whole matter of what happens after Cassie is gone represents a tangled mess of questions:

Should I stay in this house, or move now, while I still am physically able to do so?

• The surrounding area is really not very safe, and the city seems to be actively working to trash the area, letting drug-addicted transients ride the Blightrail for free, dumping them off at the end of the line on Gangbanger’s Way, building yet another meth clinic in the neighborhood (the 24-hour one around the corner serves over two thousand hopheads a day!) and planning to trash Gangbanger’s Way by running the Blightrail west and east to planned terminuses in two ghost malls. This will bring even more crime and drug addicts than we already have, which is more than enough thankyouverymuch.

• Consequently, I don’t feel especially safe here. The solution is the same solution that served well in the similarly besieged Encanto District, where my ex- and I lived for some 15 years until we threw in the towel because we had the unreasonable idea that our little boy should be able to play outdoors in relative safety. The solution: a German shepherd dog.

• And, of course, a pistol. Got one. Don’t got the t’other. Yet.

• On the other hand, the only other two places in the Valley where I can afford to live and that I think I wouldn’t hate are so far away from the centers of my social life that moving there would bring a screeching, permanent halt to my social life. I do not make friends easily (not by a long shot!) and so effectively this would mean the end of any activities outside the living room, the bedroom, and the backyard. Permanently.

• Houses in the ‘Hood are affordable because of the increasingly dangerous slums along Conduit of Blight Boulevard and the meth gang’s territory north of Gangbanger’s Way. We form a kind of middle-class buffer zone between these increasingly creepy, declining areas and a very upscale district called North Central, where free-standing houses start, on the low end, at around 700 grand. The houses in this neighborhood, especially if they’ve been kept more or less up to date and in good repair, are twice as much house than you can buy for the same money elsewhere in the central Phoenix area — both in terms of size and in terms of quality.

Five hundred grand? SERIOUSLY????

Comparable houses (sort of) in the “Arcadia Lite” area, for example, run upwards of $500,000…and they’re NOT comparable: they’re older, smaller, and they don’t even have garages — they were built back in the day when it was safe to park your car in a carport.

• Only two areas of the Valley offer housing that’s comparable to mine in a price range I can afford: Sun City and Fountain Hills. Sun City is halfway to freaking Barstow; Fountain Hills is halfway to freaking Payson! They’re both a long way from the people I know, the things I like to do, and the places I like to go. Ruby the Corgi would be placed at huge risk if I moved her to Sun City: the place is truly overrun with coyotes, which have been known to jump a six- or eight-foot back wall, grab a small dog, and fly back out of the yard with it before the human can budge. Fountain Hills also has coyotes — and the occasional bobcat. It also has ticky-tacky construction — the type where you consider a house “old” after ten years. Sun City has low property taxes, but it’s like living in a mausoleum. Fountain Hills would be like moving to another town altogether.

About an even trade…

So that leaves…well…stay here or move to Fountain Hills. This right here is about what I could afford in Fountain Hills. I hate it. I’ve always hated those stupid fake-arch windows that were the rage in cheap tract housing a few decades ago…and just look at that hideous stuff they put on the things! And one of Fountain Hills’ lesser charms is that it has no natural gas service, and so you’re stuck with those horrid glass-top stoves. Ugh. I’ve tried to learn to live with one of those things — Satan and Proserpine put one into this house. Loathed it: never could get used to it. Plumbed in a gas line and replaced the damn thing with a real stove. Though Fountain Hills has much to recommend it, the distance from activities and friends, the ticky-tacky architecture, and the all-electric kitchens add much to de-recommend it.

If we say that leaves one option — stay here — then we’re brought back to our starting point, where housing is concerned: this area is unsafe.

Next question: Assuming I stay here, should I get another German shepherd?

The sane answer is “hell, no!” Or…is it?

•  About every third house in the ‘hood now houses a large dog, many of them mighty ferocious-looking. The reason for that is obvious: I’m not the only one who feels unsafe in an area overrun with drug-addicted transients, burglars, and car thieves. The only way the ex and I were able to stay in the Encanto district as long as we did was that we had Greta the German Shepherd, she who chased out a cat burglar at three one morning, who stood between me and a guy trying to break down my front door, who saved my child’s life twice, and who had the most preternatural sense of human nature I’ve ever seen in man nor beast.

• Having lived with several GerSheps since then, I can attest that though none of them were Dog Geniuses in the sense that Greta was, all of them served as effective sh!thead deterrents. NO ONE bothers you when you have an animal like that standing at your side and glowering in their direction. But…

• German shepherds are expensive to maintain. Although it’s likely that the white line will have fewer inbred health problems than the black-and-tan model, you can be sure that even a white GerShep will be a walking vet bill. A gun is far cheaper, over the long run. Though it doesn’t make for very good company…

• I am getting to be an old lady. Chances are good a reasonably young dog will outlive me. Then what happens to it?

• This Lionel/Johnny hound looks, in the group’s uninformative photos, to be about three years old, maybe as much as five. German shepherds typically live about nine to twelve years. In six years, I’ll be 79; in nine years, I’ll be 82 years old! Do I really want to have to deal with a sick 90-pound dog at that age? Would that even be possible?

• Would a smaller dog have the same deterrent action, allowing me to feel safe living in my home? No. I already have another smaller dog: Ruby weighs all of 20 pounds. First: a yapper does nothing to discourage an accomplished burglar or a wacked-out meth addict. Second, a small dog cannot hold its own against a coyote — which our neighborhood also hosts, though not in such gay abandon as Sun City does — but a German shepherd most certainly can. And third, perps think little dogs are cute (or annoying), same as you and I do: they’re not deterred by a bouncy yapper.

Welp: no word from the vet’s office about taking the dog over there at 11:30 this morning. So I guess it’s off to choir for me. Time for a shower and a paint job…

Dog…fading

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Like the Cheshire Cat. Is Cassie a Cheshire Dog?

We now have a vet’s appointment at 8:30 on Sunday morning (any question why I favor this vet?). That will be difficult: it’s a half-hour or forty minutes to the guy’s office, and I have to be at the church at 10. So it will mean flying across the city through the usual challenging traffic, flying back, dropping her off, and flying to the church. Complicating matters, M’hijito is leaving Charley here Sunday a.m. so he can drive to Colorado to visit his 104-year-old grandmother.

Oh, God.

They wanted to see her at 11:30 tomorrow, but church has a shindig tomorrow afternoon, for which choir call is noon. I do not want to miss it, but probably should have given up and opted the event, to get the little dog to a doctor sooner. Asked if they could manage something in the afternoon or earlier in the morning: no chance.

Perhaps I exaggerate how sick she is. Hope so.

So she quit eating altogether. In spite of not having consumed a bite of food for a day and a half, she still had diarrhea this morning. That was weird. When I did coax her to eat a little hamburger, a day or so ago, she perked up quite a bit, so I figure food is good.

Naturally I take recourse to the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest: the Internet. Google “how to coax sick dog to eat.” And lo! Among the several suggests was baby food.

Trot down to a grocery store and buy a bottle (1) of puréed turkey. AJ’s has an extremely limited selection, and most of the stuff was veggies or fruit. The turkey was the only unalloyed meat. Fly home with this stuff…

Ruby, who is unafflicted, naturally was waiting by the door. That dog went berserk before I even got the lid off. She wanted that baby food!

Fought off the puppy. With difficulty, flang her out of the bedroom where Cassie was hiding. Spooned up some of the stuff, and by golly…after a tentative start, she ate it. Eventually she got the whole jarful down — that was only 2.5 ounces, but it’s 2.5 ounces better than none. Normally they each eat a quarter-pound of food per meal — half a pound a day.

It’s the first thing she’s eaten in two days. So I’m hoping that if I can get one bottle of it down her tomorrow morning and another before I leave for choir and one in the evening, that will be enough to sustain her. Exactly how I’m supposed to deal with letting her outside and back in while I’m hanging out in the choir room half the day escapes me…but I think what I’ll have to do is leave the back door open, and pray for the best.

So with this success chalked up, I ran over to the Walmart and stocked up on half-a-dozen bottles of the stuff, enough to last through Monday. By then, I hope, we’ll have a better idea of how to treat this thing, if it can be treated at all.

You know, on the 14th I wrote that Cassie had been sick for 10 days…that would mean this ailment became evident on the 4th. That’s four weeks. No wonder the poor little beast is exhausted!

It probably is remarkable that she’s still alive at all. If she had some ordinary bronchitis, you’d think it would have passed by now. Vet said he’s concerned that the problem is something a lot worse than Valley fever…but he didn’t say what. TB? Indeed, some fairly colorful ailments can cause a chronic cough and choking. Heart disease. Object lodged in the throat. Tracheal collapse. Heartworm. Canine influenza. Asthma. Chronic bronchitis. Cancer.

Lovely.