Fort looks legit to me.
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Lol bed rest. There are people and vermin in the park behind our house and they must be told off.
We are pretty much only successful keeping her off the steep stairs. My wife successfully trained her to go in a little travel bag and get carried up or down.
Her back must feel good. We call her Poppy but her name from the rescue was Popcorn for the way she jumped up and down like a popping kernel. She is back to it. She still associates being handled with the pain so we pet her head and neck when offered and don’t even think about picking her up yet. Hopefully the trainer can help us with that when we start that back up.
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Look at those sharp teeth. A vicious killer, clearly.
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In the ever threatening “rub my belly or else” pose.
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She isn’t smart but she’s cute :)
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That’s exactly what a smart cat would want you to think. Sleep with one eye open.
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This big 12-year-old baby, who I no longer live with, is recovering after having an anal tumor removed. Was caught unusually early so he should be ok, but I guess he’s been in a fun state for the past couple of weeks thanks to the wonders of pharmacology.
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My grand dog is quite attentive to the new baby but clearly views me as a play partner while his parents are occupied.
Fuck…
…update?
Trigger warning, for real, about my late and great dog:
Johnny Cash, The Dog In Brown, 2007-2016:
Here’s the thing about hemangiosarcoma: the cancer itself is not hardcore, in fact it’s pretty weak in terms of cancers. The big problem is what it does though; it causes what’s called pericardial effusion, meaning the pericardium, the sac around the heart, fills with highly elevated levels of fluid, and basically squeezes the heart until it stops. And this part is extremely aggressive. If it wasn’t for that fluke, a dog could recover and go into remission or even just live another few years if the cancer was untreated.
This is why it comes literally out of nowhere. It’s not like, oh my dog seems sick lately, let’s get them a checkup, rather it’s like the dog is playing and running around and then in a matter of hours they have trouble walking and moving and then collapse. For my dog, it was about 8 hours and I only recognized when it started in hindsight. So when we rushed to the ER vet, they stuck a needle in his heart to remove the fluid, and he was immediately back to normal jumping around the ER room. Then the doctor came in and asked if I wanted to put him down right there. I was like, uh, wat, look at him, but then she explained it. But I said, lol fuck no, what kind of bullshit would that be to cut his shit short and spare myself some money and trauma? If he dies on the car ride home then it was meant to be like that.
But they kept him overnight and there wasn’t a car ride home, and that night he crashed again, and they did the fluid removal thing again. The next day they asked me again if I wanted to put him down and I had the same answer, so they said to take him to a bigger facility in the city (this was rural Indiana so I went back to Chicago). Went there, they kept him for a couple days monitoring him, and the specialist said the surgery to completely remove the pericardium would be too invasive and chemo was pointless because like I mentioned above, this happens way, way before the actual cancer starts wreaking general havoc. So, my best bet would be to hope and get some supplements specifically for the heart fluid problem and possibly have to keep bringing him in to get the fluid drained, but that I should be prepared for the worst because it would quite literally come out of nowhere. Think how fast you can go from ‘perfectly healthy’ to asphyxiating; it’s the same concept only a bit slower.
So we go home, and he romps around like a perfectly healthy dog for a few days. We go the ER, rinse, repeat, and a few days later he passes when I was sleeping and he was in a different room, and I’ll probably never get over not being awake and with him when it happened. It really felt like he was off before I went to sleep but I think I wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening, that the fluid draining business would hold longer than a few days each time. The one huge solace is that it’s actually a super painless way to go out for the dog; despite the asphyxiation analogy I used it’s not like actually choking and it ironically almost mimics what would happen if he was put down by a vet. They just get really tired, go to sleep, and their heart stops.
Long story short, even though you haven’t updated yet, I’m so sorry man. Despite all the stuff about being prepared for outliving your dog, considering our lifespans are an order of magnitude longer, there’s not really a preparation for this, what one vet called a ‘cruel joke’.
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So sorry for your loss, and very grateful for you sharing your story. It really does mean a lot.
Update is… Olive is acting totally normal still. She’s eating and breathing and pottying normal. We’ve been giving her turkey tail mushroom supplement at dinner, and she eats it right up. Dr said she didn’t see any other signs of it spreading when she opened her up to remove the spleen. But told us how quickly it can strike. And that if she made it a year she was in the clear.
Hoping the supplement lives up to the results of the study and gives us more time with her. She’ll be 10 this month and is otherwise happy and healthy and sweet as can be.
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Ok, well, that’s a relief to hear, so I should just stress that if she goes from being normal to wobbly get her to the vet STAT. Odds are though, considering what’s already transpired, she won’t even have to deal with the pericardial effusion problem, it’s not a 100% occurring symptom, and even if she never fully beats the cancer she still has a lot of good time ahead of her.
There’s actually a sort of morbidly funny story that goes along with this (maybe it’s not actually funny at all and just plain morbid, I can’t rightly say). A good some years back I lived in an apartment with some roommates, one of those standard 3flat buildings with tenants on each floor. We were all friendly but one day the downstairs neighbor invites the building over to dinner, which wasn’t a normal occurrence even considering the friendliness. He said he made too much of this huge soup/stew thing, just followed a recipe not realizing it was meant for way more than a household. Like, a big ass cauldron of this stuff. So when we get down there I ask him where Lily, his dog, is and he said she passed away suddenly right around Christmas, like two weeks before, and that’s why he had everybody over. This guy was by no means a ‘bad’ dog owner, in any malicious sense, even though he always seemed like he didn’t want to be a dog owner. He was just sort of neglectful and absentminded and didn’t train his dogs to even do normal stuff like sit and stay and what not (though honestly, I thought that was the charm of Lily and the dog he had after, totally super friendly and nice but behaved like they had no masters and no treat was worth doing some silly trick for). I was like, we were just playing with her, she was totally healthy, this doesn’t make any sense, and he said it was some weird heart thing that just came out of nowhere. I looked at my roommate and down at the soup…
…God’s honest truth, for years, until my dog passed and I realized it was the exact same thing, I had an inkling that man cooked and served dog soup to us.
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Yeah, I’m going to hell for thinking that. That man loved his dogs in the best way he knew how and they were happy (I know because I was like the dogfather for when he worked long hours and I was always home playing poker online; I was the dogsitter for that entire building).
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