5 posts tagged “vet”

Well I took DancerMan to the vet today. He is still wobbly and has limited use of his back legs, but there is no sign of Lyme disease or any other tick born disease. The vet said that his symptoms are very characteristic of a nerve issue. He said it could be something as simple as a pinched nerve. He gave Dancer a cortisone shot and then gave me some anti-inflammatory pills to give Dancer once a day. Hopefully this will be all that Dancer needs.

5/8/09 update: so far the meds are helping Dancer still has a little bit of wobbliness but he gets around much better now and fall less often

thanks everyone for wishing him well

It looks like I may have to take one of my dogs to the vet tomorrow. My poor little DancerMan is having trouble using his back legs.

I noticed this morning that he was wobbling around and I thought this was a prelude to one of his epileptic seizures so I gave him one of his phenobarbital pills. I can not tell if it has made any difference. I do not think he is worse, but he does not seem any better. He has some problems getting around right now. It looks like he may be having some nerve problems with his back legs. He is still eating and drinking so that is a good sign, and he does not seem to be upset or distressed by his problem. He probably is so used to experiencing mobility issues periodically due to his occasional seizures that he is not scared yet. I am going to watch him overnight and if he is still not moving well I am going to see if I can get him in to the vet tomorrow.

Well I have spent most of the day resting. I am still inclined to sleep so I will be having a nice warm bowl of cream of wheat and then heading to bed. (yeah I know way too much carbs before bed but the warmth in my tummy feels good right now)

Jessica is still not wanting to eat her dog food, but she did eat a hamburger that I cooked and chopped up for her, so that is good. I will be setting my alarm so that I can call the vet first thing in the morning and try to get her up there before the weather turns bad. I am hoping they will be able to see her early and send her home on the same day so that I do not have to try and get back out of here after the snow.

After I get home I will have to get back to work getting things done around here. Even if I have to take lots of breaks to rest.

Tuesday night I started getting worried because my cookie would not get up. I was only a little bit concerned at first, I figured I was probably expecting too much from an eleven year old cookie, so I decided to go about my business and come back to see there had been any movement. I spent most of the night checking every couple of hours to see if the blankets looked like they had been shuffled around or not. By morning I realized my cookie could not get up without assistance. This sent me into a bit of a panic, because I am not prepared to to handle giving up on my cookie yet.

My cookie is my 11 year old Lab/Border Collie mix. She is the first dog I got on my own after moving out of my parents' house. Because she is mixed with Border Collie she is not all black like a lab, so after much consideration my friends and I came up with the name Oreo for my cookie. Of course she has nicknames deriving from the name Oreo, like Cookie (as I am sure you guessed by now), Oreo Coookeee (when I am trying to get her wound-up), Cookie Monster (when she is a bit too wound-up), and Oreo! Cookie! (when she is trouble, lol). [The picture is not a great one (bad camera, bad lighting, bad shot, bad day, just plain not good) but it is my Oreo]

Well when I realized she was not just playing the 'I am an old lady' card, and just let me lay here; I called the vet and got an appointment. I never thought I would be so happy that my Cookie has a cold. I was so worried that she had gone from being 'old lady' wobbly to being a cookie full of cancer. (When growing up I watched my family dog go from spry old man to cancer victim in a flash). The doc listened to her heart and her lungs (lol he had to ask her to stop panting so he could hear better) and he checked her temperature it was 104 (I really need to get a new thermometer for the critters, I have misplaced the one we had). Then he told me 'this little lady has a very bad chest cold'. I had not even realized that she had a cold because she is so sedate these days and does not exert herself enough to cause a lot of coughing. I am thinking too that the cold got bad fast because of the poor amount of heat we had in the house while the propane line was being worked on. It was not freezing in the house or anything like that but it was cold enough to aggravate a body that was getting sick.

So now my Cookie is on antibiotics with lots of indoor bed rest. I also made sure to refill the Vicks' vaporizer and plug it in so that  there would be some more help for her lungs. Especially since it is possible we will be getting rain mixed with freezing rain later today and thru the rest of the weekend; nasty weather for a cold.

I can see it has been several days since I last posted. The chaos I mentioned before still prevails. I am busy everyday working to complete multiple tasks at someone else timeline.

A good portion of all my troubles started with the need to have a serviceman come out to my house. This man had an opinion on how me and mine should be living our lives so he reported me to local authorities. The local authorities came out and they had their opinion about how I should be living so they reported me to another agency. I was almost arrested. I was given a set of standards to meet and a time line to complete them. Now I do admit that there were some things that my roommate and myself had let slide and we were already making plans to rectify.

So many things aggravate me about this whole situation. 1) I moved out to a rural county so that I would not have to deal with all the rules and regulations set by local communities and governments. 2) The serviceman could have said something to me first. [his excuse was that he did not think it would make a difference, I mentioned that he could not know that unless he bothered to come straight to me] 3) The local authorities did not even want to listen to my explanations or comments. 4) The representative the local agency sent out is an overworked, overzealous. well meaning, control junky. (Oh no I do not have any disdain for this person, yeah right.)

Now I am under the gun to complete things that I already planned to do, but now at someone else’s timeline. I also am required to redo things that I have already done but have no paperwork to prove. I also have been instructed to do things that normally no one cares if you do them or not out in rural communities.

To top all of this off I recently had one of my older dogs have a stroke and die before we could get her to the vet. We also had to put down one of our elderly cats, but we had planned that weeks ago because he had developed cancer and there was a bleeding tumor developing in his ear. He was no longer comfortable despite all the rugs we piled up for him to lay on and all the can food we gave him (he was also loosing teeth).

Oh and because of all the attention by the authorities the non-profit group that my roommate and I volunteered for has had to distance themselves from us, so as not to draw negative attention to them. I understand this and even find that it is helpful right now because of our time constraints, but that does not mean that it does not hurt.

Well I have spent more time that I really should have writing this post so I had better get back to the many tasks at hand.