Tag Archives: dog

Lumps and bumps…

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Having an old dog means there’s really no end to the lumps and bumps you’re going to find on them today that weren’t there yesterday. I’m told fatty lipomas are particularly common in old Labrador’s – and Maggie has more than her share of those. As long as we confirm that they’re not malignant, I’m more or less happy to leave them be rather than subject her to an invasive surgery to correct something that’s basically cosmetic.

The story is a little different when it comes to the most recent tumor. This one is growing under her right eyelid and if left unchecked could cause damage to her eye. That falls well into the category of “not cosmetic.”

We schlepped over to the most local of the region’s specialty vet’s offices this morning to meet with the veterinary ophthalmologist for the first of what’s likely to be several consultative visits. They ran a few tests, poked and prodded, and looked deeply into her eyes… and confirmed that “yep, that’s a tumor and we should probably cut it off.” At least that part wasn’t a surprise.

Maggie’s overall prognosis is good. The procedure is fairly straightforward, so we’re not breaking new ground in veterinary medicine. That’s not to say the procedure is inexpensive, of course. It’s not the kind of vet’s office you ever walk into thinking that the visit is going to be budget friendly. It’s the price of progress. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

The only question now is whether I want to get another consult with the surgeons to see if taking off one of the large fatty masses on her shoulder is something we should think about adding in to the surgery. On a younger dog in my mind the decision would be a no brainer. With my girl pushing 12 now, I’m hesitant to take on anything invasive that isn’t strictly necessary.

At least I know what I’ll be spending the weekend pondering.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. RFID. Rolling our RFID at access points was supposed to make getting to work faster and easier while reducing the manpower required to make sure everyone showing up is actually supposed to be there. Over the last two weeks of the roll out period, seven of ten attempts to use the fancy new “no touch” pass system failed to function properly. It didn’t work and ended up being about two times slower than it would have been if I’d have used the regular access lanes. EZ Pass makes it work on the interstate at 70 miles an hour for anyone with a transponder from a dozen different states, but we can’t seem to figure it out in a limited deployment under controled circumstances at five miles per hour. To quote General Beringer in War Games, “After very careful consideration, sir, I’ve come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.”

2. Human feelings. Its been a year since I made the decision that any further treatment for Winston was really just me staving off the inevitable while making him suffer for my own benefit. I’m just now getting to a point where I can look at pictures or the occasional video of him without becoming a blubbering mess. Feel free to ignore me if my eyes still happen to get a bit misty from time to time. Sigh. Human emotions are dumb and I’d like to have mine removed, please.

3. Finding “no.” I am a professional bureaucrat. Over the better part of two decades I have learned many useful tips and tricks. One of them, most assuredly, is how to use process and procedure to slow progress on an ill advised adventure to a bare crawl. Believe me when I say that I know how to run out the clock with the best of them. Sometimes, though, a project is going to take wing no matter how ill advised or badly developed the concept. It’s such a high priority to someone that it’s going to happen. Once a special someone is committed on that course of action, what I need the master bureaucrats to do is fall their asses in line and manufacture ways to find yes instead of laying down every possible hurdle. I see what you’re doing. I know those tricks, So please, get the fuck out of here with that douchbaggery just this one time.

Updates on a chocolate lab…

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A couple of weeks ago, I took Maggie in to the vet for her regular checkup. As they get older, I approach these visits with increasing trepidation with every dog – mostly out of the fear that the vet will find something that should have been obvious to me, but that I missed simply due to familiarity, or that the regular blood work will show something new having gone out of whack since the last visit. For better or worse old dogs are just like old cars or old people – sometimes shit just stops working for no other reason than it’s old and broken.

Given Maggie’s last six months and the extensive vetting she had to get over her stomach trouble, I had lots of tests forming the baseline. Some of them I was expecting to be bad just as a matter of course. Others I expected to have gotten worse over time. It didn’t quite work out that way.

Maggie’s blood work came back with all the key data points “in range.” Even if it’s being held there through the advanced application of chemistry, it was as good a result as I could have hoped for – and not the one I was expecting. At a minimum, I went into this series of tests assuming that we’d be dialing up her medication to hold the same ground.

There’s no hiding the gray in her muzzle. My girl is still and old dog. She’s still got Cushings. But for the time being it hasn’t gotten worse. It’s still being effectively managed with her current dose of medication. Believe me when I tell you I don’t take that for granted for even a moment, because I know just how quickly the opposite can become true.

Although Maggie’s checkup was mostly good news, we’re headed over to the veterinary ophthalmologist in two weeks to get some small lumps and bumps looked at. One is purely cosmetic and has been there for a few years now, though it’s gotten bigger and is prone to bleeding when she rubs it. The other, most likely a small benign tumor or skin tag, is starting to form on the inside of her eyelid. This new one is the most troublesome to me since it’s in direct contact with her eye, though I’d like to see them both gone for her comfort and my peace of mind.

Yeah, because circumstances…

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I always know I’m ending a good couple of days when I get to Monday and have nothing significant to report. If nothing else it helps confirm that I’m, in fact, not a miserable fuck by nature, but rather made so one day at a time by… uh… circumstances.

Covering why those circumstances are unavoidable is well trod ground for me so I won’t repeat myself so soon after the last post on the topic… other than to say how incredibly fortunate I am to have been able to spend the last two days mostly in interrupted communion with the cat, dogs, books, and home cooking.

It’s probably good to remind myself why I put up with a monumental kind of asshattery… and to remind myself that, like a prison sentence, there’s a fixed end in sight.

Now I just have to make sure my blood pressure doesn’t drive me into an early stroke before I can run out the clock and focus on spending the days on something that matters.

I’m making a list and checking it twice…

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I probably put more effort than is strictly necessary into traveling. Even a million years ago when I was traveling for work on a regular basis, I was the guy who showed up at the airport with a giant suitcase that pushed the 50 pound weight limit for a four day trip. It got exponentially worse when I lived in the center part of the country and most of the trips suddenly because reachable if I were willing to put in a long day’s drive. Then I’d fill the bed of the truck with all manner of stuff that I might possibly need, or more often just things that would make the hotel room feel more like home. If I couldn’t actually be at home, that was the next best alternative.

Seriously, I’d show up at five star hotels, slide into their valet line, and proceed with an unpacking experience that looked like a cross between the arrival of a gypsy caravan and the journeys of Lawrence of Arabia. What can I tell you, I’m believe in my own comfort… and for me, that generally means having the right things on hand whenever I might want or need them.

Here we are many years since those trips of old… but the impulse to take the whole house with me is as strong as ever. That’s why I’ve been working on my Christmas List for the better part of a week now. It’s not a list of presents, of course, but rather my planned packing list.

The list these days is a little different. It consists mostly of dog beds, dog food, dog toys, dog medication, crates, bowels, leashes, harnesses, and then the usual allotment of books, electronics, charging cables, and a few changes of clothes. In other words, mostly things that I could personally live without, but would really prefer not to if it’s avoidable.

This year I’ve gone so far as to have some of the requirements shipped ahead. Yes, thanks to Amazon I have pre-positioned certain dog related items at our holiday destination so we can just fall in on it when we arrive. Then all I’ll have to decide is whether to abandon it in place or repackage it for backhaul. It turns out you can take the boy out of logistics, but you can’t really shake the logistics out of the boy.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to start thinking about the Tetris-style load planning I’ll need to sort out to make sure everything is safely stowed in the truck cab or at least protected from the weather under the bed cover.

Obviously I have no idea how normal people travel.

Southern dogs…

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It was too dark to make for good pictures, but Jorah got what I presume was his first exposure to snow this morning. Given the fully stricken look in his face I got the impression that he didn’t love it. Hard to blame him there.

It occurs to me that with one long ago exception, I’ve always had southern dogs. In fact, Winston, Maggie, and Jorah all originally hail from Tennessee. I don’t suppose that counts as “deep south,” but certainly a great deal further south than their new home in the mid-Atlantic.

Of the lot of them, Winston was the only one who legitimately seemed to ever enjoy a snowy morning… even though his love was based on shoving snow into his mouth moreso than doing anything particularly entertaining.

So I’ve got another southern dog who doesn’t seem to want to spend a minute longer than abslutely necessary standing around in the snow. Do dogs take on the craracteristics of their owners, or do owners taken on their dogs personalities? Either way, I think this new revelation will work out for the best.

What I learned this week…

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It turns out that squirrels aren’t the only scavengers in the yard who will devour every scrap of bird seed they can find. A few nights ago, I watched Jorah sidle up to one of the pylons holding a feeder and then nudge it repeatedly until some seed fell out so he can eat it. I’ve apparently now got to devise an anti-dog device that might also help with squirrels. I knew these hooligans who live with me would race to eat dropped seed, but I had no idea one of them would figure out a way to turn the whole back yard into an on-demand treat dispenser.

Telework Wednesday, interrupted…

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It was a good day at Fortress Jeff. It was a scheduled Telework Wednesday. I’d made eggs and toast for breakfast. My laptop was sitting patiently booting up in the sun room in preparation for the day. All the critters had been fed and I thought they were all accounted for… except, of course, they weren’t.

Somewhere between slathering butter on my toast and setting the dirty dishes in the sink, Jorah snuck off and a ranging loop through the house. It’s become a common enough sight now that he’s a more or less trusted agent.

That’s the point where the morning started its trip off the rails.

Unbeknownst to me, Jorah made a stop in the sunroom and took the opportunity to bite my work laptop’s power cord almost directly in half… a situation I didn’t stumble upon until I walked into the room with my coffee and more or less prepared to started the day.

Dogs chew. It’s a natural fact. The issue here is that for the 7+ months he’s been here, Jorah was remarkable good at leaving everything alone that wasn’t one of his toys. He didn’t chew chair legs, or moulding, or shoes. He never showed so much as a moment’s interst in any of the exposed cables that are strung everywhere around the house. He ignored them completely, right up to the point today where he didn’t.

So instead of starting off Telework Wednesday with a nice easy read through the overnight email and a bit of mouth scalding coffee, I took off my fuzzy slippers, put on a semi-clean pair of jeans, and then made the round trip drive to the office to pick up a spare power cord that I had stashed in my desk.

So this week my day working from home started off with the same old drive to the office… only slightly later in the morning so I was able to enjoy even more traffic than usual. If you think I’m not going to find half a dozen castoff Dell power cables to create my own strategic reserve against future incidents of cable gnawing, well, it’s like you don’t know me at all.

The slightly abridged story of another sick dog…

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Since I seem to be permanently destined to have at least one sick dog on the premises, I suppose it’s only fair that I throw out a little update on what we’ve been up to since late last Friday.

The short version is that over a span of about an hour on Friday night I watched my already sickly chocolate lab go from her normal self to drooling, vomiting, and blasting out unimaginably large quantities of liquefied, high pressure shit. I undertook the “40 minute” drive to the nearest emergency vet with great vigor and complete disregard for pesky details like traffic laws and personal safety. I was more or less convinced that by the time we got there, I’d be dropping her off for a necropsy rather than treatment. I never thought I’d be happy to hear a dog retching and hacking in the back seat. For Friday at least it was the sound of not being dead yet.

After 36 hours of treatment, blood tests, fists full of medication, an ultrasound, and round the clock monitoring, the official diagnosis is “we don’t really know.” The symptoms don’t really present as something directly related to her Cushing’s disease and the ultrasound didn’t show anything radically different than what we saw back in March. Inconclusive.

In the absence of a solid medical diagnosis, I’ve arrived at a speculative cause for all this last week’s problems. What I think happened is that sometime around 6:30 Friday night the dogs found something in the yard – perhaps a mushroom – and noshed on it. For Maggie, already compromised with Cushings and general old age, the result was sudden and violent illness.

The key to my speculation doesn’t actually involve Maggie at all, though. When I got home from the emergency vet around midnight Friday, Jorah’s crate floor was spotted with drops of something. At first I attributed those drops to a reversion to peeing in his crate, but a closer look showed that he too was drooling prodigiously. In Jorah’s case, though, it lasted just a few hours and dissipated. He never showed any signs of feeling badly otherwise, which I know from sitting up through the small hours of Saturday morning waiting to see if I needed to drag another dog in for heroic measures of treatment at weekend rates.

I talked to our regular vet last night and laid out the timeline of events, went over the details from the file, and presented my own observation of the events. Without being led there, his first opinion was that it sounded like they had both eaten something and promptly got sick in proportion to the strength of their respective systems. It’s not exactly a confirmation of my logic, but I was glad to see that his analysis of the available evidence mirrored my own. Unless something is proven otherwise, “ate something” is going to be the official story of what caused this week’s series of unpleasant events at Fortress Jeff.

With leaves coming down and the ground covered it’s going to be horribly difficult if not outright impossible to verify any of this. It’s going to be harder still to comb the area for anything that could further agitate the situation. Part of me knows we’ll be relying on some level of luck in avoiding future problems. It’s not optimal, but we’ve lived here a fairly long time now without something in the yard causing mayhem and chaos. One bad day out of 1200+ isn’t necessarily a cause for panic, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking at the compound with a new level of unease.

The screecher next door…

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Sitting around the emergency vet on a Friday night with not much to distract you leaves a lot of time to think… and to observe the comings and goings of those moving around you in the world. The thing I observed most on Friday night… and then again on Sunday morning was the genuine imitation outrage that so many people felt when they were expected to pay for their pet’s emergency treatment.

The ones in the treatment room right next to mine would have been hard to miss, even if I wasn’t casting around for something to occupy my mind while we waited. They’d have been hard to miss because just after 11PM, one of then started screeching that the estimate to treat their dog was “too damned much” for what they seemed to think was a simple treatment – blood work, xrays, and emergency surgery to set or amputate a broken leg.

The value people put on things is always curious. You’re at a vets office in the closing minutes of a Friday night. They have a huge staff who are all being paid for overnight weekend work. They have diagnostic imagery tools that a decade or two ago would have been rare at a lot of rural hospitals treating people. You’re paying to have access to doctors, techs, and technology at a time when almost nothing else is open. As much as the staff at one of these places may love animals, money is what keeps the doors open at times when you might otherwise have to wait 48-72 hours to have your dog seen.

Look, I don’t love spending emergency vet kind of money, but I get why it comes with a premium price tag. Even if I didn’t get it, I’d know better than to scream at the twenty-something young tech who’s trying to walk me through the options because I’m not an awful human being. I’m sure someone will say lashing out angrily is a perfectly natural response in a stressful circumstance… but I’d really prefer it if they didn’t lash out and agitate the people who I’m going to need focused in on taking care of my own pup after they’ve finished up with the screecher next door.