Like Snow, Only Stickier

Because Abby’s lost about 20 pounds, we’re trying to put some weight back on her bones. We’ve cooked more for her than we have for ourselves. Her current favorite is browned turkey and rice. Tim mixed up a huge batch before he left for his fishing trip, but we’ve already run out. This is OK, because I was worried that she wouldn’t eat in protest to her schedule being disrupted. It’s been the opposite– she begs for food every time I’m within six feet of the kitchen.The only drawback to the turkey/rice mixture is that we have rice everywhere. And I mean everywhere. In the bathroom, the basement, the office, and mostly the kitchen and living room. Because we’re cooking so much rice, and because Abby is a messy eater (and I’m a messy cook), there are pieces of it on the kitchen floor that I inevitably step into and track elsewhere. The rice gets trapped in Abby’s jowls as she eats, and it pops out when she lies down or wanders around the house. For example, I was just in the living room, watching her lick her paws. A huge clump of rice fell onto the floor from her mouth, a leftover from her meal 15 minutes earlier. She nudged it with her snout, realized that it wasn’t a meat product, and continued to clean herself.

I’d rather have a rice-filled house and a dog with an appetite, though. My housecleaning skills have always been debatable, but here’s proof that I completely suck.

Today Was a Good Day

We’re trying to get Abby to eat as much as possible. She’s still around 54 pounds, and we want to get some meat on her bones. You are what you eat, so meat has been a huge part of her diet. Tim cooked up another batch of ground turkey and rice, and she’s had several servings.I was proud of myself (and her) for getting all her evening pills down, with the help of some sliced turkey.

But the best part was seeing her get some energy back. She’s been outside about 20 times since I’ve been home from work. She trotted after a squirrel in the yard, sending it up a tree. She’ll also go outside, and then she’ll turn around as if to say either, “Let me back in” or “Come outside with me.” When I open the door, she acts as if she’s going to come in, and then she turns her head to the side like she’s looking at the neighbor’s yard, ignoring me. We repeat this about 3 or 4 times until she decides to come in, or I give up and let her stay out for a few more minutes before I try again.

She also visited me in the shower this evening. She likes to lick the water off the shower curtain when I leave the bathroom door open. She hasn’t done that in weeks, so it was a good sign.

I’m hoping she continues to eat well and get her strength back up. Maybe we’ll even work in a walk this weekend.

Things and Stuff

We’ve gone to every other day with the prednisone, and Abby’s having an easier time not emptying her bladder every 2 hours. We’re also going to go off the sucrulfate, which she’s grown to hate. It’s become a game to see how we can sneak all her medicine to her. My current trick is to wrap things in sliced turkey. Tim’s been cooking turkey and rice for her, which she enjoys greatly. She’s been picky with her dry food and still isn’t eating as much as we’d like, but we’re doing what we can. She perks up when she hears “chicken” and loves to get chicken-flavored treats. That was another way to sneak pills.The vet said that we could have tried a liquid form of sucrulfate by taking a syringe and spraying it into her mouth, but I can’t even imagine how mad she’d be at us. It’s funny, but it’s not. She made the most hilarious face today when I was feeding her turkey slices– it looked like “bad beer face.” She scrunched up her nose and her lower lip came up over her upper lip as if to say, “don’t even be sneaking those nasty blue pills in there.” She’s on to us.

We take her in for more blood profiles on Wednesday, and we’ll figure out what to do for maintenance.

I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues

It’s been a sucky week in general. We’re both extremely stressed about the dog. She’s lost almost 20 pounds so far. We’re trying to feed her more to get her to gain some weight, but yesterday and today she’s been very sluggish and refuses to eat other than breakfast and dinner. She perks up for a couple treats, but for the most part she’s been lying around and sleeping.I’m a basket case. The littlest things get me teary. Tim took Abby for a walk around the block today, and she didn’t even need the Gentle Leader collar anymore because she wasn’t pulling like she usually does. Normally, she’s at the end of the leash in front of us, leading us. I remembered that this is how the last couple chapters went in Marley and Me, and we both turned into fountains. We’re both going through post-vacation letdown, work is demanding, and we’re not looking forward to some obligations this weekend when we’d much rather be at home. I don’t even think the guests of honor are looking forward to it, so I don’t feel so bad saying that.

My shoulders are back up around my ears again.

I’m hoping that Abby will bounce back in the next day or so, and that she just needs to rest up from the day at the vet on Wednesday. Her intestinal tract seems to be working well, so that’s been a relief so far.

I’m glad that the weekend is finally here. Even though we’ll need to get up with Abby during the night, we need to catch up on our rest. No sleep makes me extremely crabby, and combined with the stress level, it’s not a pretty picture.

Maintaining

After two weeks off, we took Abby in for her vincristine IV treatment today. The vet took her blood work, and her lymphocytes (4200 or 4700) and white blood cells are good (her white blood cells are almost normal). Her red blood cells were down a bit (3200; 3700 is normal), due to the loss of blood from the diarrhea. We’re going to monitor the red cell count closely to make sure it doesn’t go down even more. If the red blood cells were to drop into the teens, we would need to do a transfusion. That would not be fun for any of us.We might be going on maintenance sooner than expected. Originally, the vet was going to administer vincristine this week, and then vincristine with a dose of cyclophosphamide next week. For maintenance, she gets the vincristine every 4th week, with three weeks of prednisone in between.

We’ve scaled back to giving her prednisone every other day. I’m hoping that helps with her thirst. She just drank about a gallon of water, so we’ll be getting up with her in a couple hours to let her outside. Tim joked that Abby likes to call water “revenge juice” for all the pills we made her take today.

She’s not fond of the sucrulfate at all. We tried almost every treat in the house, and I was finally able to sneak it down with some turkey deli meat. I hope I haven’t ruined turkey for her, because she refused to eat it when I tried to give her Pepcid later. She kept eating everything but the pill; she’d swallow the good stuff, and then spit the pill out as if to say, “OK, what’s next?”

The vet techs said that she takes her pills different ways from each of them. One tech (Joan) gives pills to her placed on top of a biscuit. Another tech (Janet) puts her pills in water to dissolve them.

We’ve found a few stray bits of pills around the house. Yesterday I found a tiny piece of sucrulfate that she left on the blanket downstairs, and a few days ago I found her thyrozine in the dining room. She’s getting sneaky.

She was pretty tired when she got home from the vet today. The next few days are crucial, to see if she has any adverse gastrointestinal reactions to the IV. So far her excursions in the yard seem normal.