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Pets

Dog Back; Human Unraveled

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Whew! WHAT a Day from Hell!

If you’re ever (un)fortunate enough to land in (un)lovely Phoenix, remember this survival tip: never, EVER drive around this exquisite city in the rush hour. And bear in mind that evening rush hour extends from about 3 p.m. to something after 6 p.m. Morning? Make it 7 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. At least.

Y’know, I hated living in Southern California: crowded, crass, ego-driven, ticky-tacky junky dumps every which way you turned. Shopping was annoying, time-wasting, and often fruitless. People were so focused on themselves they didn’t even notice the other humans around them. Driving was a horrid, hectic, miserable hassle. Neighborhoods were bland, faceless grody collections of ticky-tacky apartments and cheaply built houses.

Chez Pitz.

Welp. Gotta say: I feel approximately the same about this place. The only difference between Phoenix and unlovely Long Beach is that Phoenix gets one helluva lot hotter in the summertime. In all other respects, the two garden spots echo each other when it comes to the…uhm…graces of living. Dump A and Dump B: one smeared up and down the Pacific Coast, the other oozing across the Sonoran Desert.

Started out the day perusing real estate online, briefly. Just in the past few months, housing prices have exploded.

We have, for example, this garden spot. The place is smaller than my house. Jammed closer to the neighbors. And when you come down to it, situated in a neighborhood that’s about the same as mine in terms of quality, economics, social class, and crime rates. The thing is on the market for a good $200,000 more than my place is worth (Zillow claims my house is worth $540,500…and here I thought I paid way too much at 235 grand…). That would be because it’s located in darkest Arcadia, rather than on the top end of North Central. It’s been on the market for two hundred and sixteen days and still hasn’t sold.

That, I would offer, suggests the asking price is WAY too high.

First thing this morning it was off to the vet’s, there to get her smelly teeth worked on. The vet is way to Hell & Gone over in the Arcadia Lite district, a good 30-minute drive under the best of conditions. Make it 40 to 50 minutes in the accursed rush hour.

Leave the poor terrorized little dog there. Traipse back home, still navigating the horrific morning rush-hour traffic, and mope around all day in the absence of my furry friend. Worry, worry, and worry some more about a) the state of the pooch’s health and b) the staggering amount I figure Dr. Bracken is going to charge for yanking rotten teeth and scraping the rest of them clean, presumably under full anaesthetic.

Back at the Funny Farm, wrestle with the finances, wrestle with the busted garage door, wrestle with the pool, fart around fart around fart around fart around. Study real estate ads, thinking…really…I do need to get away from the accursed Tony situation. Calculate how I could buy a new house without cluing the bastard to where I’ve moved. Not difficult, really. 😉

Waste an inordinate amount of time on these and similar ventures.

Along about mid-day, call — yes, I can come get the dog.

Back into the traffic, this time plugging into the early afternoon rush hour (wherever you need to turn left, you can’t!). Drive and drive and drive and drive and…and…huh?

OVERSHOOT the street where the vet’s office resides.

Whaaa???????

Now I’m LOST in darkest Arcadia.

Drive around drive around drive around drive around…can NOT FIND HIS STREET!

Pull into a parking lot, walk into a business, and ask them if they know where Meadowbrook (his street) is. They do not. They pull out a cell phone, look it up, and decide I prob’ly passed it some blocks to the north. This: puzzling, since their phone seems to be showing the map in an east-west layout.

Drive around drive around drive around drive around…STILL cannot find his street!

This is weird, because I’ve been going to this vet for a good 20 years (with a hiatus or three) and yes, I DO know where Meadowbrook Drive is.

Go into another shop. This place is close enough that the clerk can say…oh, yeah: it’s three streets up that way.

Drive around drive around…FINALLY find the vet’s place.

All this driving around is happening as the afternoon oozes on and the traffic thickens. And thickens. And thickens.

Retrieve the little dog. Staff tells me not to feed her and not to let her drink too much water.

Right. Don’t know much about corgis, do ya?

Amazingly, though…unlike the avaricious vet here in our part of town, the one who proposed to extract several of Ruby’s teeth, to the tune of something over a thousand bucks, Dr. Bracken has not yanked out even ONE of Ruby’s fangs…all of which are now shiny and white.

Drive and drive and drive and drive and drive, the better part of 45 minutes: through heavier and heavier traffic, dodging up side routes I happen to know about, admiring the very expensive and fancy real estate in Paradise Valley (is there any way I could afford one of these palaces?), scrabbling past a couple of chronically congested intersections…at last, make it into the ‘Hood.

Get the dog out of the car. She is PARCHED. Let her drink some water but try to keep her from drowning in it. Not an easy task.

Refrain from feeding the dog. Piss off the dog.

Reheat some left-over grocery-store pasta…bolt that down. Yech. Why DO Americans eat this stuff?

Reflect on how horrible Southern California was as a place to live in the late 1950s, early 1960s. Reflect on how much lovely Phoenix has come to resemble that scene. Want to go someplace else.

Anywhere else.

Looking Forward (NOT!) to Another Lovely Day in Uptown Phoenix

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Ugh! This is gonna be a horrible day.

Up, as usual, at 2 in the morning with old-lady insomnia. Kinda sorta got back to sleep, dozing lightly on and off, around 4 a.m. Then up at 6 a.m. to drive the Ruby the Corgi to the vet, there to have her teeth (expensively!) cleaned. Have to leave here around 7 to get there “between 8 and 9.”

This guy is the best vet in town, IMHO. If anyone will do her teeth without ripping me off, this guy will. But…

Well.

Yeah.

Her teeth stink, indicating she has a gum infection. Her mouth is so narrow, it’s impossible for me to use the contraptions they’d like one to use to clean a dog’s teeth. So yes. Her teeth no doubt are very dirty. Yes. To clean her teeth you have to anesthetize her to knock her out, a spectacularly expensive step that is just Step 1. And yes. He no doubt will have to pull out some of her teeth. So yes. This is going to be a bank-busting day.

La Maya and La Bethulia have a pair of mini-dachshunds. That breed also has a long, narrow muzzle…just like a corgi’s. The “long narrow” part is the operative issue. The mouth is so small and so tight, you can’t get a gadget in there to clean the dog’s teeth…especially not when the dog puts up the Fight from Hell every time you try.

I had stopped taking Ruby to Dr. Bracken (best vet in town) because his office is in the Arcadia district — a LONG way from the crime-ridden fringe of Sunnyslop, where we live. It’s an unpleasant drive under the best of circumstances. But during the rush hour? Ohhhhhh gawd!

To get there requires turning left out of the ‘Hood onto a main or semi-main drag. But Our Honored City Parents have set up all the major north-south routes out of here so that YOU CAN’T TURN LEFT DURING THE RUSH HOUR!

So, before I even reach the Arcadia district (where you may be sure that once again I’ll get lost), I’ll have to drive around and around and around and around Robin Hood’s Barn just to turn east in his direction.

Yes. To turn east out of the’Hood, you have to turn right, then turn right again, then turn right a fourth time. You have to overshoot the main drag that you need travel on. Go down to the next through street. Turn in the opposite direction from the way you need to travel. Then at the next main drag turn right in the direction from which you came. Then turn right onto the first north/south road. Then turn right again onto the desired main drag. Once you’re headed eastward, then you just sit back and drive and drive and curse and drive and drive.

It’s a bitch of a process, and not one I’m looking forward to.

If I have to pick her up at any time after 4 p.m. (i.e., during the afternoon rush hour), I’ll have to repeat the process.

And THAT is why I quit going to Dr. B. and hooked up with La Maya’s vet.

Well. Every time those women took their dachshunds to that vet, the woman was wanting to knock them out and clean their teeth. And every time she cleaned their teeth, she extracted some more teeth. And every time she did that, she presented them with a thousand-dollar bill!

No kidding. Every time you turned around, it seemed, La Maya was getting another thousand-dollar hit upside the head from that woman.

Fine when you both have decently paying jobs.

I, however, am now “retired”: another term for “unemployed.”  And I can NOT afford bills like that. So, as I will explain to Dr. B when I see him this morning, locking me into a cycle like that is going to mean I’ll have to put Ruby to sleep.

And that, I do NOT want to do.

So one of the highlights of this horrible day is going to be BEGGING him not to bankrupt me with the doggy dental gambit. And of course since vets have their own bills to pay, I’m not gonna get far with that.

Welp…it’s getting late. Better get up and start getting ready for the Endless Drive…

Whatever can go wrong…

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STOP THE WORLD! I wanna get off, and get back on in about 1947.

Holy mackerel! Whatever CAN go wrong WILL go wrong. Whoever made up that hoary saying must have been living my life in a previous incarnation.

Greeted the sun this morning by finding a hard thing in my mouth. Whaaaaa???

It’s part of a tooth. A back molar simply fell apart.

So now in half an hour, when the dentist’s office opens, I’ll have to call and make an appointment to get THAT fixed, no doubt to the tune of a great deal MORE hassle, expense, and painandsuffering.

Meanwhile, I’m supposed to spend the afternoon at the church office, staffing the front desk. How I’m gonna do that and sit in a dentist’s chair at the same time escapes me. But we’ll deal with that when the need arises. I guess.

At 9 a.m. — less than half an hour — I need to surface at Leslie’s Pool Supply, therein to get them to test the water and sell me the chemicals needed to rebalance the chemicals.

Pool Dude was here yesterday — while I was traipsing from pillar to post around the Valley — Dermatologist in Avondale, then hours at the downtown credit union, then up the moribund Target on 19th Avenue, therein to buy some area rugs so that my son’s dog can walk around on the tiles without falling over (he’s old and weak and his feet slide out from under him when he tries to walk on tiles — and my whole house is tiled).

The Target folks insist they’re just remodeling, even though it’s hilariously obvious that they’re selling off merchandise with intent to close down the store. If they admitted that the location is going out of business, of course, they’d have to clear out the junk with a sale. As it was, I realized that Charley does not need fancy rugs; all he needs is the rubbery stuff you lay down underneath them, which give him plenty of traction to move around. Poor old pooch.

Dermatologist removed more suspicious growths. Reported that none of the last crop had turned to cancer. Yet. I remarked on my one-time best friend’s brother-in-law, a healthy and athletic man who, I recently learned, died of skin cancer — malignant melanoma.

More than one of which I’ve enjoyed meself.

At the credit union, I explained to the extremely nifty dude that I can’t get into my account. We dorked around and dorked around, changing my password. As it develops, these days to change a bank password you have to have a cell phone!

Fortunately, I’d brought the useless iPhone my son gave me — useless because with the plague, the senior center nearby shut down its iPhone class, because Apple’s “class” was a sadistic joke (more so for the alleged instructor than for the customers), because I do not know how to get into it, because…on and on. We were able to fire it up and use it to reset the bank’s password. Now all we have to do is get me into my account there.

With one headache and crisis after another since then, though, I haven’t had time to attempt that trick.

This morning will be consumed with dealing with the swimming pool. When I left for the dermatologist trek — before Pool Dude surfaced — the walls were festooned with fresh algae. I left a check in an envelope for him and flew out the door.

When I got home, I found the empty envelope on the pavement near the pool and the pool’s walls festooned with fresh algae.

Tested water…chemical balance seemed OK — good enough for gummint work, anyway. But decided I should take a bottle of it up to Leslie’s for a full array of tests, and while there try to snab some granulated chlorine.

The chlorine shortage continues — kicked off by a fire that leveled the factory of the major US producer, a year or so ago, and dragged out by political correctness (chlorine being bad for you, after all). So I’m going to have to pay through the wazoo to re-fill my pool supply kit…I’m down to something like two three-inch tabs. Eventually I’ll probably have to re-plumb and install one of those salt-water systems, which will cost an arm and a leg. As I recall, it didn’t do that great a job on La Maya and La Bethulia’s pool. But…I guess if we can’t buy chlorine anymore, we’ll have to take what we can get.

Come four o’clock this morning, good old Cox’s phones were down. Come five o’clock: same. Come six o’clock: same. It finally came back online. Fortunately, I’ve learned to use the iPhone just enough to get into my email and to also onto the Web to check what time Leslie’s opens.

Speaking of the which, it’s ten till. Sooo…off and running!

Soggy Day in Rattie Central

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Rathame…

At 7:00 this morning it was 90 degrees and overcast. And damp. Very, very damp.

That is extreme, even for lovely uptown Phoenix! Especially for this time of year. Normally it’s very hot, but also very dry in July. So you can bitch and whine about the heat, but it’s basically empty bitching and whining.

That is so until early August, when we start to get the kind of weather we have now: hot and humid. The difference is, in normal (pre-Paved Paradise) times, we would have had a spectacular thunderstorm every afternoon or evening, followed by much cooler temps.

*****

And during the interval when this scribble was interrupted by a phone call from WonderAccountant, it’s started to rain. Hot, wet, and raining.

W.A. is having a wondrous Adventure in Medical Science. She experienced some chest pains; her husband drove her up to the Mayo, where she enjoyed a number of interesting tests, experiences, and discussions. [heh! typed “unjoyed” there…have we discovered a new word for this sorta fun?) They concluded she was not having a heart attack — what she was having, they seem not to have figured out. But she is now reamed steamed & dry-cleaned, so called to cancel our planned evening at the concert tonight.

Between you’n’me, I’m very sorry she wasn’t feeling great but moderately relieved that we don’t have to venture out tonight. Really, I don’t enjoy driving in the rain and the dark with my fellow homicidal drivers (talk about taking your life in your hands!!), and truth to tell, even with the full complement of covid shots, I’m just not very comfortable about spending time in crowds.

An hour of gossiping produced a consensus that we both think the Mayo Clinic is far, far superior to most of the medical practices in the wild here, as experienced during our respective lifetimes as Arizonans. I guess if I ultimately make up my mind to move, it’s gonna be to someplace closer to the Mayo’s ER — EMT’s in this part of town will NOT take you to the Mayo. They give you the choice of John C. Lincoln (please just take me to the Hormel slaughterhouse…), St. Joseph’s (where one night I waited outside their ER for over five hours, before I finally gave up and had a friend come take me home; then got another friend, by dawn, to drive me to the Mayo, where they slapped me into surgery before I could even take a seat in their waiting room), or Good Samaritan, where I haven’t been back since I gave birth without anaesthetic.

Okay, to be fair: the anaesthetic wasn’t needed.  I thought labor was supposed to hurt a whole lot more than it does, and so by the time we arrived there, the kid was ready to pop out.

*****

Apparently Rattie attempted a foray into the yard this morning, despite all the throwings-around by Gerardo and his crew. Ruby signals Rattie’s presence by going batsh!t every time she spots the little gal through the Arcadia door.

Rattie has gotten wise to this, since every time I hear Ruby go on a tear, I let her out the garage door (which is a lot easier to open, because of all the anti-burglar hardware on the Arcadia). Ruby shot out and patrolled the side yard, but by then Rattie had either hopped back over the wall or climbed up into the trees to take refuge. I think the former, since Ruby evinced a great deal of interest in the odor trail along the wall’s footing and the view of the top of the wall.

I do hope the blockading strategy will keep her out, but fear the truth is we are going to have to take the tangle of cat’s claw vines down off the alley wall. If I could think, offhand, of a legal way to replace the jungle plants (which make for a fine Rat Hotel) with something that would block the view of the backyard, that’s what I would do. But to run a couple more rows of block along the top of the walls here in the ‘Hood (which are about 5½ feet tall, easy for a grown man to peer over), you have to get a permit from the city. This involves a bureaucratic hoop-jump that I do not wish to engage.

Neither, I suspect, did any of the neighbors who have taken matters into their own hands — many of them have piled several rows of block atop the developer’s original walls, far more than would be legally allowed. However, I have a friend whose ex-wife enhanced her backyard wall — in a house, like this one, that occupied a corner lot — and was ordered by the city to take the entire expensive thing down. So she ended up with no wall, no privacy, and no money.

Even if I jump through the regulatory hoops (and succeed…), they no longer make cinderblocks in the kind of dust-gold color the developer used, back in the early 70s when he built out this tract. So whatever goes along the top would not match the wall. One could, in theory, paint the wall…opening not only several cans of paint but also a whole new can o’ worms… But that, then, would have to be maintained for the duration of the house’s existence.

If you could find chimney-red cinderblocks (not an impossible proposition), you might be able to make it look like you intended to have a contrasting line of decorative (heh) block along the top. But since no one else has done this, dollars to donuts it’s not a practical idea.

The vines have some distinct benefits, not the least of which is that they cut the stupefying heat that would be reflected off that wall in their absence. Secondarily, they produce rafts of very lovely bright yellow flowers.

So it goes: lovely Phoenix, Arizona, July 16, 2021…

She’s OUT! She’s Off and Running!

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So I’m chowing down on breakfast whilst browsing through The Economist — the single best general-interest periodical for people with functioning brain cells, IMHO — when I hear Ruby launch into a yap-fest: YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP…from…huh? From the front of the house????

WTF!?!

Leap to my feet, race through the open back door into the yard, jumping into an old pair of clogs on the way, and fly into the back yard, hollering RUBY! RUBY!!

No dog.

Round the corner of the house at a dead run and see Ruby bounding cheerily toward me…through the open side gate!

WTF, indeed! That thing has a double-cylinder dead bolt, and it gets locked every time the gate is pulled shut.

Love up the dog, lure her back into the house, then go outside to figure out what that’s all about.

Well, the doorknob-like handle on this gate has never been real efficient. Its little latch bolt — the tongue-like thing that fits into the strike plate and holds the door shut — wants to slip out of its assigned nesting spot, though it will stay put with some coaxing.

But the thing isn’t locked, and I know I locked it (it’s a double-cylinder deadbolt, so locks with a key from both sides). Because I never walk away from a door or a gate without locking it and checking to be sure it’s locked…for reasons that have been described floridly on this very blog.

So, yea verily WTF!?! Did somebody pick the lock open?

Unlikely. Why bother when there are so many juicier targets all around? Besides, it was raining last night. No burglar or bum in his right mind would be tromping around in that.

But o’course, the “in his right mind” part is operative. Hmm.

At any rate, thank the heavens Ruby had a nice little bark-fest while she was exploring the front yard, probably occasioned by some other dog owner walking their pal past the shack. And thank the heavens (x 1016) that she came to call.

It rained enough during the night to turn the backyard’s quarter-minus into slush, so now the kitchen floor is covered with mud.

But at least the little dog did not get hit by a car, creamed by a passing neighbor’s pit bull, or stolen.

And NOW…yea verily… I don’t even get through this short blog post when a helicopter — a big one, sounds like the military copters that emerge periodically from the Reserve base down on McDowell Road — comes ROARING over the top of the house, at tree-top level. Holy shit! Who are THEY after?

No one, evidently. He continues on, westward ever westward, so probably it’s a military exercise in how to chase down snipers in civilian residential areas. Ducky.

We’ve gotta get outta this place…

Day from Hell to Wrap Up the Year from Hell

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Come Saturday: something is wrong with Ruby the Corgi. She’s emitting ruby-colored liquid poop. Literally: cranberry-colored collywobbles. And barfing blood, too, so it appeared last night.

This, of course, starts after dark.

My son’s emergency vet said they were closing. I found another emergency vet halfway across the city. My son came with me. When we got there, we were informed we would have a two- to three-hour wait, and we had to stay in the car.

Not so much, said I.

We drove to Alta Vista, a venerable old veterinary where I used to take my dogs and cats, which now operates at night as an emergency veterinary. There, we found a SIX- TO EIGHT-HOUR WAIT!

Finally I just said no, we are not waiting eight hours with a sick dog in the car. If she’s going to die, she’ll be better off dying at home.

Sooo… That was just gawdawful.

Come Sunday morning, Dog still has red diarrhea. Apparently this is not as bizarre a manifestation as it sounds, and in fact may not be life-threatening. It looks like if I can just get her into a vet, there’s a med that can treat it. She seems not to be as sick as she was Saturday night, so I have some hope that she may throw this off. A similar rumination appeared at another website.

She survives Sunday night, anyhow. Come Monday, the instant 9 a.m. rolls around I’m on the phone listening to the honored Dr. Bracken’s INTERMINABLE advertising blurbs on the hold button. This guy is the best vet in the city, and has been for decades.

Finally, finally, finally I get an appointment at 2:30 in the afternoon. Meanwhile, wouldn’t you know, I’ve got a dermatologist’s appt at 11 a.m. Or something: can’t read my handwriting. Call and cancel that, since it’s an hour’s drive in each direction, which I would like not to add to the 30-minute trudge (one-way) to Bracken’s office.

This, I figure, will mean another quarrel over the food I give her, which is the same as commercial dog food only without the artificial fillers and crap. AND it’s not made in China. She’s thriving, just like three other dogs thrived into old age on the stuff, and I do not appreciate the high-pressure pitch to buy the canned goop & kibble the vets sell in their lobbies. I guess I could just go yessir yessir, buy a can of the stuff, and donate it to the Humane Society. That would be easier than trying to defend myself, I guess.

Like everything to do with pets in America, veterinary practice has become a vast, predatory business. Individual practices are being gobbled up by huge, national conglomerates that do, really, predate on customers. They try to high-pressure you into all sorts of unnecessary products and treatments, to the point where, if you’re paying attention, you sense that about nine times out of ten you can’t trust what they’re telling you. Bracken so far is still an ethical, independent practitioner, though I know he’s reaching retirement age and I do think he may already have sold his practice to one of those operators. The give-away is that godDAMNED series of blatting sales pitches and scare stories on the hold button: those are characteristic of the conglomerates. An independent vet doesn’t subject his customers to that. Nor, I suspect, can he afford that kind of answering system.

At any rate…

Monday passes, and, amazingly, Ruby gets better. Never do make it to the vet. I withhold food but put down plenty of water. She guzzles water and then guzzles some more. And by noon she has completely stopped barfing AND firehosing out the rear end. The day proceeds, and she remains stable.

I give her a few bites of boiled chicken mixed in with some cooked rice. Nothing happens.

It looks like she had some kind of enteritis and was able to throw it off. What would cause that, I do not know, though I suspect a bird (or a human) could have dropped something mildly toxic into the yard. Thank god it wasn’t rat poison.

We have this baleful admonition from one of the first and biggest chain veterinaries going on about how urgent it is to get the dog treated. “These diseases can range from mild and self-correcting to severe and rapidly fatal.“  Looks like we’ve got “self-correcting” here. “Mild” is not a term I’d use, though. Banfield, I don’t trust, speaking of corporate massively profit-making veterinary boondoggles. Of course it’s in their interest to scare the ess-aitch-ai out of you.

Hmmm… In the “larn somethin’ every day” department, now I come across this: hemorrhagic gastroenteritis. HGE, for short. Interesting…something I hadn’t heard of. Didn’t know there WAS anything left in that category! 😀 Merck Manual seems to indicate that blood tests are needed to diagnose this alarming and mysterious ailment, because a bunch of other ailments produce similar symptoms. Evidently the main treatment is “prompt” administration of IV fluids.

Right. After a six- to eight-hour wait in your car…

Parenteral antibiotics effective against Clostridium spp (eg, ampicillin 22 mg/kg, IV, three times daily, or metronidazole 7.5 mg/kg, IV, twice daily) may be considered, but it is uncertain if this is needed in all cases.

In a prospective study of dogs with AHDS and no clinical indices of sepsis, treatment with amoxicillin-clavulanic acid did not affect mortality rate, duration of hospitalization, or severity of clinical signs. This might suggest not all cases of AHDS are due to primary bacterial infection or that the bacteria involved may not be susceptible to amoxicillin-clavulanic acid.

Hmmm…she drank lakes of water Sunday night and Monday morning — meaning that yes, she probably was dehydrated.

As of Tuesday morning, no sign yet that she’s about to croak over, though. The diarrhea has stopped. She trotted outside as usual to pee, then trotted back in the house begging to be rewarded with a treat for accomplishing this human-bedazzling treat. I gave her a tiny piece of the boiled chicken. Now she’s back on the bed and snoozing again, waiting for the human to quit poking at the glowing box it likes to balance on its lap.

If this is what she had (has??), then it’s spectacularly lucky she threw it off…if she did. We’ll see…apparently this thing can come back on them some 10% to 15% of the time. And evidently it can carry them off, pretty damn fast.

Meanwhile, sez the same source, the signs of this ailment are so similar to parvo that it takes a blood test to differentiate them.

Parvo???!?

But she has had the parvo vaccine…hmmm… We’re told dogs of any age can get it and the vaccine doesn’t necessarily work 100%. It sez here…

According to Los Angeles veterinarian Wendy C. Brooks, DVM, “Every day that goes by allows the [infected] dog to produce more antibodies, which bind with and inactivate the virus. Survival becomes a race between the damaged immune system, which is trying to recover and respond, and potentially fatal fluid loss and bacterial invasion.”

This, from Whole Dog Journal. Though that august publication is given to holistic approaches — and of course, it’s journalism, not the higher reaches of science — it is a useful and apparently fact-checked rag. Over some years of sporadic reading, I have yet to find anything truly wrong in it. Quoting Dr. Jean Dodds, DVM, an expert in veterinary hematology and immunology:

…sometimes, the parvovirus vaccine fails to work as intended.

First, she made clear, no vaccine produces 100 percent protection 100 percent of the time. “Vaccination is not a sure thing,” she explained. “It certainly improves the odds that an animal will be protected from disease, but it does not guarantee this. There is no way, even with the best vaccines, to be sure that any given individual’s immune system will respond in the desired way to protect that animal.”

Not all dogs have perfectly functioning immune responses, and, similarly, not all vaccines function perfectly, either. “There will always be an occasional case of a ‘vaccine break,’ which is what we call it when a vaccine fails to protect an individual against an infectious disease challenge,” said Dodds. “However, when a break occurs, if the animal has been appropriately vaccinated, it will usually experience only a mild form of the disease.” Dr. Dodds speculated that this is the most probable explanation for what happened with the infected puppy mentioned above.

“While there are some rare exceptions, where an appropriately vaccinated animal nonetheless experiences a lethal form of the disease, it is far more typical that such an animal will experience only a mild form of the disease and will recover quickly,” she said.

Holy shit!

Not seeing any reports of a parvo contagion in the county this fall. However, in October an outbreak occurred in Washington State…and of course, this being Christmastime, half the ‘Hood has relatives down here visiting in their RVs. It’s been quite a while since Ruby had that shot.

I’ll call Dr. Bracken’s office again this morning and see what they say about it. I have a feeling that discretion may be the better part of valor, though: the less disturbance the better at this point.

This morning she hasn’t had a BM — which means she’s not showing any diarrhea…yet. She hasn’t barfed since Sunday: this is Tuesday. Just now she demanded to be fed…but then, she’s a corgi. Corgis can eat under the direst circumstances: they do not lose their appetite. Ever. Just gave her a tiny serving of boiled chicken and rice. We shall see if it stays down.

Godlmighty. Do you suppose this Spate from Hell is ever going to come to an end???