Wonderdog & the 9 Month Checkup

This is an old photo, but I love it.


I never really realize how worried I am about things until they're over. Honey goes in every 3 months for chest xrays and a checkup at her oncologist, and every time I get all flipped out. I think I've slept a total of 9 hours this week. Her appointment was Monday but we had a dead battery so it got pushed to today. This had the added advantage of letting my blood pressure increase for another 4 days. The boy took her in without me 'cause I had bunches of stuff to do at work, but he just called and not only did she weigh in at 58 pounds (from an all-time low of 42.5 in the throws of radiation side - effects) but her lungs are STILL CLEAR, and the lump we found on her side is a “fatty mass” which is a pretty gross thought but also way better than anything else it could have been. Her eye, which had started looking particularly nasty within the last few days, isn’t a retinal detachment or bleed, she cut her cornea scratching. They gave her some antibiotics and sent her hone with the ‘all clear’. The only downside is that since radiation she’s become downright mean to other dogs. I think it’s a combination of her knowing she’s not in great shape, her vision loss, and her insane level of spoiled that’s only increased since she got sick (prime example was last night, when we wanted to go to bed but she was laying across ALL our pillows, so instead of moving her, we each found about 6 inches of headspace and just toughed it out). I’ve never been happier than right now with my lumpy fat injured mean dog.



I do have some bad news. One of our neighbors had a dog named Smoke who was a rescue and about as spoiled as Honey. He died this week. He didn’t seem to have any real major health problems, but he was an older dog. He always used to lean against my legs or nuzzle me, and was one of the 2 or 3 dogs Honey would let near me without trying to eat. I’ve been told that one day Honey will die too, and it’s something I can’t think about without tears.

June 18th - 4 months out of radiation and happy as a dog wiht her own couch...

I seriously can’t believe it’s been over a month since I posted here. I guess it was easier at first, when she was feeling different every day, but now it’s just like we have the Hun back, except maybe a little more playful. I keep thinking that maybe she knows she’s got cancer and is living with a little more energy than before, but whenever I share this idea with other people, they tend to tell me that she was probably feeling a little sickly before we noticed something was wrong.

Quick recap in case you’ve just joined us: my guy and I boarded Honey when we went to FL for xmas/Hanukkah. When we dropped her off, she was fine. When we picked her up, she was so sick. We did two rounds of antibiotics and then the vet found a lump in her hard palate. It was a tumor, and we did a month of radiation, then two weeks of the worst side effects ever. I go back and forth between kicking myself for boarding her, and being glad we did because she would have probably had a much more advanced cancer if she hadn’t developed the secondary infection which initially led us to the vet.

Anyways, Honey’s beyond spoiled. The longest period of time she’s been alone since January this year is about 4 hours. She’s also sleeping on her own bed again and best of all, SHE CAN BREATHE OUT OF HER NOSE so I can sleep. It’s fantastic. Last weekend her Zadie was here for father’s day and she played fetch with him for about 3 days straight, and insisted on sleeping on the air mattress with him instead of on her couch (yes, HER couch. A neighbor moved out and gave it to us, and it’s exactly honey-sized). The only lingering problem we seem to be having is her eye – her left eye was in the beam of the radiation and the tear duct is permanently destroyed. We give her cyclosporine eye drops daily, and they’re actually bringing back her ability to produce tears, but it probably won’t ever be 100%. She’s also learned that the eye drops feel good so it’s supereasy to give them to her. Other than that, the radiation side effects cleared up, and although it took almost 3 months out from the last treatment to get there, she can breathe normally again. She’s also gaining back the weight she lost, and we’re actually at the point now where we can’t see her ribs any more. I think that might have had something to do with all those slices of muenster she’s getting as treats…. She’s also got ALL her face hair back, and it’s about half white half brown. We were assured that if it came back at all it would be all white, so I’m taking the salt-and-pepper effect to be a good thing.

And since she was diagnosed in January, and given 2 months, she would have died 3 months ago. Instead, today I get to go home and play fetch and cuddle with her while we lay around like slobs and watch Deadliest Catch.

Cancer Survivor

Looks like we’re out of the woods depression-wise! We’ve been weaning off pred for about a week now and no bad side effects like lethargy or excessive sleeping. Also, Cameron went to New York for three days and she was ok with it (!!!) which is new and exciting. When she was doing radiation she used to freak out if it got past 9 or 10 pm and cam wasn’t home yet – nights he worked were a real joy, and she’s do the ‘where’s daddy’ dance – pacing, whining, the odd howl, heavy panting, sometimes shaking – just a total freak out ‘oh god where is he’ situation. Nothing I did could calm her down, but we dropped him off at the airport and she wasn’t exactly thrilled, there was some watching out the window and then for the first day she would pull me towards the parking lot whenever we went for a walk, looking for him near the car, but last night she even slept in her own bed all night, which is unfreakingheardof. I worked from home (LOVE that my job lets me do that) Wednesday and Thursday and Cameron’s plane already landed, he’ll probably be home in like 35 minutes. Wish I could be there to see the festival of daddy has returned Honey’s going to throw when she sees him.

Her hair is almost grown in now, I’ll take some pictures tonight of the white-faced Hon. The coolest part, though, is that some of the hair is coming back in BROWN and we were assured that it would be completely white if it came back at all. Wunderdog! She also looks lovely in her new ‘cancer survivor’ bandana – which she is now, a bona fide cancer survivor. I think I even saw her breathing out of her nose a little over the last few days, and she seems to have more of a sense of smell. The only variable that’s still really up in the air is the tumor shrinkage – radiation kills the cells when they try to replicate, so they won’t die until they try and grow, so it can take up to 3 months for the tumor to shrink all that it’s going to. We finished on February 29th so today is April 18th – we have 40 days left until we can reasonable assume it’s as small as it’s going to get. The catch is this – if it doesn’t shrink enough for her to breathe out of her nose, we may have to have it debulked, which is a surgery where they would go in and remove the majority of the tumor so she could have a clear airway. The other thing that would go wrong is if it shrinks TOO much, because it metastasized through the roof of her mouth (that means it ate the bone that separates her mouth from her sinuses – her hard palate) so if it goes away to the point where there’s no tumor to form this barrier, she will have to have surgery to create one and keep her sinuses free of food / other stuff in her mouth. Please keep your fingers crossed for perfect shrinkage.

In new-place news, it’s awesome but our furniture doesn’t fit and Cameron still hates my grey Formica table, but it looks WAY too much like an airstream to throw it away. We’re starting to actually get some stuff settled and decorated decently, but ultimate ‘our house is perfect ness’ is a long way off. However, it is starting to look like a nursery, which I LOVE!

Biopsy, New Apartment and Nice Windows.

The biopsy report on Honey’s ear came back yesterday, and the lump is benign! We’re thrilled. She’s also back to her normal self and being weaned off the pred and painkillers. We had to up her dose of tramadol again after the ear biopsy but it seems like she’s not in pain any more so we can start to back it off again. We’re also moving to a one bedroom on the second floor, a tiny one but at least we get 2 rooms now J we are going to have to get Honey a second bed for the living room. She’s not thrilled about the massive packing up of stuff, and every time Cameron takes an armload of stuff upstairs she greets him like he’s been gone for a week or so. It’s strange; we’ll have more space but less room. Not sure if I’ve figured that out or not yet, but hopefully it’ll work. Plus, the windows are all really big and perfectly Honey-sized, she doesn’t even have to lift her head to look outside and bark at the people walking by on her sidewalk (the NERVE). I have a birdbath to put on one of the windowsill so she can lay on her bed (the couch when we get one) and watch the wrens splash around. It also has 10 foot ceilings and wood floors. I have big plans for a wine and cheese party as soon as we get our stuff settled.

CATCH!

Honey played catch today - and actually hopped up on her hind feet and snagged the orange ball out of the air. She's also ploughing through her third can of dogfood of the day. Her nose is almost free of scabs, and has been passing out licks like there's no tomorrow. we're down to 1 3/4 pain pills per dose, from 2 1/2. We're going to need to step her prednisone down soon and I hope she keeps her appetite. The pics are from her walk earlier today (top) and from last night (bottom), when she played with that ball for the first time in a MONTH - I cried. Now there's a post - dinner headroll happening on the floor that I need to go be a part of.

HOLY CRAP!!! we have bedding rearandgement, chuck it ball playadge and litckatude.

Today was really amazing - We went to Larchmont this morning and took Honey, had sushi (which Honey loved) and then home - Cameron had to work and Nancy and Tybee and I stayed home, sitting in bed, watching Ab Fab while Honey napped. Tybee went to a show with a friend who lives here, and Nancy and I took Hon for a long walk (like 10 blocks) where she investigated lots o yards and peed on everything. I noticed something about half way through our walk, she was SNIFFING things - like her nose was moving and her lungs were moving in tandem to the sniffage. I was SO PSYCHED. So we let her sniff everything she wanted, because hell, it's been two months since she could smell anything - and after our walk we fed her a can of dog food (2nd for the day) and took her on a car ride to Home Depot and then Ralphs.

After Ralphs, we came home and Honey decided it was high time she was played with - with her CHUCK IT BALL (really hard rubber ball that she can't destroy) and she spent two hours shoving her ball on everyone asking for the fetchatude. Her face looks better than it did yesterday, hell, it looks better than it did three hours ago. She ate a THIRD can of dog food and demanded more fetch, then a walk and more fetch, and she just lay down (when her daddy and grandparents left for the evening). It’s AWESOME. I've spent two months watching her get sicker, and in the past two days she's turned it all around. My baby is gonna be ok.

blue skin nosicle and a 1 week check up!

I know it’s been a while since I posted about Honey’s progress, but I’ve been hangin’ with the doggiegrandparents and Tybee. The vet said Honey was looking really good, and was indeed starting to heal. Apparently the animals get worse for about a week and then turn a corner and get batter pretty rapidly. She was starting to get pink skin around the edges of her sores, and today (it’s Sunday morning) the majority of her skin (the nosicle area that was raw and sore) is purply and pinkish and it’s feeling so much better she is letting us touch / kiss it. These are healing pictures! - Honey with Becca, her favorite lady, Honey with Nancy, the doggiegrandma, and Honey at the Grove, which is an outdoor mall, rockin' out in the shade (her nosicle is sensitive to the sun).



We’ve taken her everywhere in the last few days, the Grove, the Promenade (both outdoor malls) and a few restaurants where she had to wait in the car, but we checked on her every 10 minutes or so. It’s fantastic; everything we’ve done all weekend has been centered on ‘what can we do with Honey?’ and if we can’t bring the dog, we don’t do it. Honey’s really responding. Lots of strangers are giving her pets and she’s getting to smell lots of new and interesting things. Last night she even slept on her own bed all night. At first we were nervous, but the end result was that I got a whole night of sleep as well, and it’s awesome. First thing this morning she got up on our bed and it looked like she was breathing out of her nose, but we couldn’t be sure.

There is some bad news, though, she has a bump on the inside of her right ear that’s new (in the last week) and we’re going to need to have it biopsied. The vet couldn’t get a good sample of it with a needle so we have to have her sedated so they can get some of it to look at on a slide. It’s in a fairly easy place to get to if it needs to be removed, the inside flap of her ear, but that’s not something you want to hear.

fingerbabyfoodstravaganza

Just thought I'd share a picture of Cameron finger-feeding Honey some strained peas / prunes / lamb baby food at around 2:30am Monday.... It took about an hour but we got some food down her. Strained prunes and opiates - breakfast of champions. (please note the prunesplatter on his leg)

Her painkillers are so high now that she won’t stand up and rearrange if she can’t find a good breathing position. She’ll stay put and gasp every 45 seconds for hours. I can hear the gasp noise even through earplugs (35 db) and that means I have to stay awake to get her to sleep before i can fall asleep. Friday and Sunday this was around 4, Saturday it was 6:30. I feel like I'm 127.

And this would be really funny if it wasn’t so sad – she KNOWS she’s not allowed to rub her face on stuff, so she waits until I’m out of the room. And she’s getting really good at doing it quickly, so I’ll go into the kitchen and pour some juice, and walk back into the living room and she’s bleeding, but she managed to do it when I wasn’t looking. I’ve also caught her mid-headroll on a pile of warm laundry, which then has to be re-washed, but how can you do laundry and not let your sick dog sleep in it? It’s impossible. I seriously can't figure out how she can complete a headroll so fast when walking across the room takes her a full minute. Amazing.

It's like fighting fire. With arrows (Sunday).

It took us less than 24 hours to completely destroy the apartment after I cleaned it on Saturday. There are bits of foam all over the floor from the inside of her dog bed (I'm washing the cover, and she destroyed the filler while I was downstairs – no more than 3 minutes and she annihilated a twin bed sized foam pad) and laundry everywhere. The kitchen, which I scrubbed yesterday, is now full of dishes that need to be washed, and for some reason a few of the chairs are sticky. The dog won’t sleep, won’t eat, can’t play, if we take her for a “walk” she meanders about 3 feet and stops, stares into space and will stay totally completely still until you make her move or she falls asleep. When we’re in the house, she follows me really close (less than a foot of distance, which makes it impossible to move because I might accidentally touch her), but wags her tail and smiles whenever I look at her. Earlier she acted like she wanted to eat, but it was a clever ruse, she took about two licks each of the assorted baby food flavors I bought and then walked away. I guess it’s another omelet, maybe ill add the lamb baby food or the organic peas with brown rice.

*eight minutes later*

She fell asleep leaning on me standing up in the kitchen, and her omelet is cooling now. She did drop the bone (this squeaky toy she holds in her mouth and can breathe around) and is watching me type, wagging, so maybe she’s hungry and will eat the lamb-green peas-egg concoction I just made her, but probably not. Oh well, tomorrow we start prednisone and there will be a whole other set of issues – apparently she’s going to be so hungry there’s a possibility she’ll start nibbling my fingers when I fall asleep. One can hope – she’s down around 47.5 pounds now, normal is about 51.

In other news, I’m so tired I tried to watch ‘Flushed Away’ this afternoon, and couldn’t follow the plot. That’s a whole new ring of hell – I have a degree in English lit and I couldn’t follow a G rated Disney flick. SIGH.

Saturday

 I've spent today vacuuming the apartment over and over, because Honey keeps shedding fur / skin / whatever and its really, really gross. I can't take the e-collar (the cone-looking collar) off her at all now, because she claws at her face and opens it up more. Ugh. She did eat lunch, a 2-egg omelet with spinach and salmon, which i cooled to room temperature and hand fed her, because she hadn't eaten and was NOT going to eat dog food, thank you. Tomorrow evening we start prednizone, so she will be ravenous according to the vet, and will eat whatever so i'm saving the goopy dog food i made her that she wasn't interested in. 

The pain killer dose has increased from 25mg twice a day to 100mg three times a day, and I gave her the pills at lunch (cleverly smuggled in a hunk of salmon). After she takes pills, its really interesting to watch her as they take effect.  She goes from standing and being fairly alert to falling asleep on her feet. this morning I gave her a massage, and after lunch she asked for one so while the painkiller kicked in I rubbed her and she fell asleep with me supporting her. 

Saturday night we took Honey to our friend Eric's house for an 'end of radiation' party. We took her bed and blanket, and chew toy and we played star wars monopoly and she napped on the floor next to me. She started getting uncomfortable around 12 so we took her home and had a truly terrible night - she simply cannot sleep with the collar on, and someone has to watch her constantly if it's off. I got to sleep around 6 am, when Cameron woke up.  

Graduation Day!!!

The Vet - beautiful banana trees and lots of glass. Good ole' VCG!

The radiation graduation board - Honey is front & center, in the cowboy hat and aviators.....

AWWWWWWWW my honey...

Honey and Jordan with their people.... Jordan's radiation graduation picture is between us.

The sculpture in front of the vet.

Today was Honey’s last day of radiation!! I’m so stoked I can’t even begin to explain it. Her face is looking really really rough, and will continue to get worse for a week or two, but will ‘turn a corner’ and heal. I know this is gross – but what’s happening to her is basically that a scab is forming just under her skin and flaking off, taking her skin and fur with it when it falls off. The end result is that her face is going to be skinless, raw and just really awful feeling for a week or so. The inside of her mouth is just as bad, with tissue sloughing off the inside of her lips and gums, and I can’t imagine that her sinuses are much better inside, although we can’t see them. Poor baby. She keeps trying to itch her face on anything that’s still long enough – the bed, us, the floor, and we can’t let her because we were told horror stories of dogs scraping their faces off. Her dose of the painkiller is going up again – it was one pill twice a day, and we’re up to two and a half pills three times a day, but she can sleep and (sometimes) even eat, and she can tolerate a lip prop so whatever she needs, we’ll give her.

They took her off the anti-inflammatory today, as her liver enzymes were getting really high, and in two days or so (once the anti-inflammatory gets out of her system) we’re going to start her on prednisone, so she’ll eat. Last night we gave her some fresh spinach and a fried egg, but she won’t eat her dog food outside the vet any more. We’re also allowed to use lubricants on her lip props now, except not petroleum based.

Right now she’s standing near me with her head hanging down, I’m relatively sure she’s breathing out of her nose, but she’s half asleep. Nothing is as pitiful as watching a dog fall asleep on its feet. I’m going to sit with Honey on the bed and watch some bad tv on this glorious Friday night. I'm including pictures of her last visit to the vet.

Holding my breath until tomorrow

In re: moldy orchids, apparently some types of mold are beneficial and this is one of those types. I’m not buyin’ it, and I’m repotting them stat, as all I can find is one stupid photo of mold on orchids online. You’d think a community as obsessed with plants as the orchid community would have made full use of the ability to post photos to the internet, but evidently not. I can find a description of beneficial mold which reads like this – “white fuzzy mold I see on my soil” I mean, really. What is that? Not clear at all. And crazily unhelpful. But the plants look superhealthy so I’ll wait until they stop blooming and then repot in new medium. I’m currently drying them, to help inhibit the growth of whatever it is that’s using my babies as host.

Honey did ok last night, she wouldn’t eat well and we had trouble putting lip props in and keeping them in. she also refused to take her pills and we had to shove them down her throat, which made me cry because I know it hurt her and I hate that. I coated the pills in butter, came at her mouth from the side and shoved them between her teeth on top of her tongue, then held her nose up and stroked her throat so she swallowed them. She didn’t manage to spit any back up but I did bump her gums with my nails a few times and I know I scraped some layers of skin off. It breaks my heart that she lets me do things like that to her that have to hurt but she just stands there and lets me do it. I feel like a monster. Tomorrow is her last radiation treatment, and our final consult with the vet, and then the side effects get nasty. I’m not going to post any more current pictures of her until she starts healing, because I know I sure as heck wouldn’t want anyone to see me if I was that hurt.

OMG I slept! (2 more radiatoin sessions!!!!)

Last night Honey went to sleep on her own bed for the first time in over a month. She was lying on her side with her head hanging off her bed, sort of with her nosicle pointed down towards the floor, and we stuck a lip prop in her mouth and she went to sleep, breathing well. Unfortunately we were both so freaked out because she was sleeping on the floor (is that bad? Should we worry? Should we call her?) that we didn’t get to sleep until around 1:45, to be woken up by Honey getting on the bed and laying on me at about 2:12 (by ‘on me’ I mean curled up tightly against me, with her chin and a paw on my leg or stomach. That’s her favorite) so I covered her in a throw, stuck in a lip prop and wadded a shirt up under the side of her head, as she cant breathe unless her head is tilted to the side. I woke up at 6:35 with my alarm and neither she nor I had moved. I feel like a total glutton for getting 4 hours of sleep at once. It’s awesome.

The bad news of the day is that my orchids have MOLD in their potting matrix. I have no idea what to do about this – I looked some stuff up online and it says to repot them as soon as they’re done blooming. Shoot, I have no idea how long that will be, as they both just bloomed, and won’t they die in the mean time? it also said to “wash their roots to insure no mold spores remain” apparently these people think mold spores are about the size of small pebbles, because there is no way you can “insure no mold spores remain” without soaking the roots in boiling acid. Anyone know how to fix this??

17 down, 3 to go.

And the side effects are getting worse. I think a lot of it is her reaction to the painkillers, and it seems like if she gets wound up it’s really difficult for her to chill out again. Last night she was beside herself because Cameron wasn't home, pacing and whining and howling (she’s really funny when she howls - she doesn't make noise, but throws her head back and purses her lips). I got her a really really soft chew toy, one of the kind that would normally last about 2 minutes and then have to be thrown away in pieces, and she just carried it around while whimpering and wagging her tail. I couldn’t chill her out so I lay down on the bed with her and she didn’t seem able to get comfortable, she kept climbing behind me and laying on my pillows and following me when I got up to get some water, so I finally took a nap, and she would fall asleep for about 20 minutes, then wake up and realize Cameron wasn’t home yet and start the freak out dance all over again. I think the best it’s been was the might I was cooking and she was watching me. Maybe I need to do something in the house that’s a little more active and she will be too distracted to do the daddy dance (I’m not actually buying this – just hoping in print).

I had a really bad dream last night, I'm not sure what was so freaky about it but it scared me, my mom and Honey and I had gotten off the train at the wrong stop and were waiting for it at the MacArthur Park station (not the best neighborhood) and I leaned down to pet her and she was panting. It was weird, I woke up and was completely wired and freaked out for like half an hour. There wasn’t even anything remotely scary about that. I don’t get it.

We got to a point this morning around 4 am where it seemed to hurt her to have the lip prop in her mouth, so I can’t wait for Friday when we can give her some topical pain reliever, and experiment with lip props covered in cold Vaseline or something else to make them less abrasive. Or maybe she will start to get used to the pain killers and settle down.

In other news, there’s a hawk riding an updraft outside my window (8th floor downtown L.A.) and the lovely dendrobium Cameron gave for my 27th is juuust about in full bloom. I think I need a saguaro, but then my window garden will be complete.

Side effects and Pearl Harbor Specials

I cannot believe how strong Honey is. Her face is starting to show the radiation effects, and it's not pretty. There are about three places on her face where the skin appears to be peeling off, and you can see red raw flesh. If I had one of those anywhere on my body, I doubt I would be able to do anything but cry and complain. Honey has three, one on her eyelid and she still wants to play. The skin is starting to slough off the inside if her mouth and it seems to be really painful to her to breathe with her mouth open, I guess when the tissues start to dry out they hurt. It's really difficult to put a lip prop in now, although we've switched to neoprene so it's pretty much the lightest, softest stuff we could find. I wait until she's almost asleep and then I slide it in as fast as I can and sometimes it works and she falls all the way asleep. We’ve also started running them under cold water before we use them, and I think that helps. I can't believe this is the same dog that wanted to play fetch this afternoon. It's really amazing. I can never hope to be as strong as she is. She and I spent all weekend lying around alternately eating and watching World War 2 specials on the history channel. If anyone has any questions about Pear Harbor, now would be the time to ask me.

We're anticipating pain while eating, there is already some but making her food a little waterier than baby food and spoon feeding her while telling her how good she is seems to work. She even sometimes bypasses the spoon and eats on her own, but I hold the bowl at face height and praise her anyways. I'm pretty sure she'd endure more pain if we were telling her she was good. Last night we got her frozen yogurt and she seemed to like it, she also likes her food better if it's cold.

This morning her left eye was really dry (it’s in the radiation beam) – full of gunk and the lids were folding in and rubbing against her eye. I don’t know if we’re allowed to put anything in it, we’re not allowed to put anything on the sores because lots of topical creams and drops etc. can disperse the radiation beam, and make it less effective. Cameron’s going to call when the vet gets there at 9 am, so hopefully our eyedrops will be radiation approved. In the meantime, I put a few drops of water in her eye and that seemed to help a little. I can’t believe the dog lets me put eyedrops in, she must know I’m trying to help.

I didn’t get much sleep last night (spent the night making Honey comfy, and unfortunatley she was most comfy on top of me), so I’m off to raid the coffee pot.

"Right on schedule" 11/9 (11 sessions down, 9 to go)

Good news always comes with bad, I suppose. It looks like the part of the tumor in her mouth is shrinking, but she’s starting to have side effects from the radiation. We found a small sore on her chin last night, about a quarter of an inch around that had no skin and was raw, but didn’t seem to bother her too much. She also started spitting out the mouth prop all the time, really not tolerating it. We varied our arsenal a little, introducing a neoprene pad for lip separation and a rubbery valve that work for a few minutes before she vetoes it. This weekend was good – she always seems to feel better by Sunday, so it’s especially sad to see her going off to radiation. I’m having real trouble seeing past this – I think part of me thinks she’s not going to get any better, ever. Today the vet told us he’s starting to see signs of the side-effects, such as the little sore and they also said that her gums and the insides of her lips are looking pretty raw – more so than they anticipated. We think this is from the lip props. So we’re facing the prospect of having her unable to handle a lip prop and unable to breathe from her nose. Hello, sleeping in 3 hours shifts. The vet also said she took a while to wake up today, I’m not sure what that means, but I’m impressed that a dog who had only been under general anesthesia once, when she was spayed, is doing so well now she’s getting it every day.

We do have some pain killers – they start with a‘t’ I cant remember the name exactly, I want to say ‘turbinado’ but that’s sugar - I know it flipped her out a little the first time I gave it to her, she actually howled, so we’re thinking maybe if we start giving her when we’re both home that she’ll feel better. Tonight I’m going to start completely pulverizing her food, and we’re going to have to switch to canned soon. Neither of which I’m looking forward to – I think wet dog food of any type is the grossest thing on the planet. Really, when I was working as a wildlife rehabilitator I used to have to actively keep from gagging while I fed baby birds (the baby birds ate soggy puppy food, and the smell wouldn’t come off my hands, even with bleach).

So it looks like fetch will soon stop. I really, really hope the tumor in her nose is reacting the same way the section in her mouth is, and pulling back. It would be AWESOME to sleep through the night again. I think I could manage it even if she was sleeping on our bed – which she started doing immediately after the CT scan – sort of, fine, do what you will but I’m sleeping between you and I’m taking the good throw blanket, so there.

In other news, my parents got a dog, and it’s really cute to see my mom so excited. It’s also weird to be giving ‘here’s how you teach a puppy to sit’ directions in the middle of ‘here’s how we a shrink a dog’s tumor’ training. Sigh.

Something really good and unrelated happened Friday, though, I sent off my family tree to the Northbrook Historical Society. I’ve been working on it for about three years now, and it finally reached a point where it was organized enough for others to understand and maybe benefit from if they’re researching the same families. I’m quite thrilled.

day 8 (of 20) and some high-fiber yummies

Apparently it’s all business as usual for the Hunn. She’s at the point where she has the vet figured out (today was day 8). Cameron takes her every day, but I usually call him about 15 times for updates - I’ve heard she walks directly to the scale and climbs up then sits so she can be weighed. She LOVES the staff and will follow the willingly to the back, where I’ve been told she greets everyone and then lays down on a bed that’s under the tech’s desk. Yesterday and today she hopped up on the table where they give her the twilight gas without being asked. I think it probably has something to do with the fact that when she’s coming up from the anesthetic her favorite tech sits with her and pets her “so she doesn’t have a traumatic wake up experience” and then she gets hand fed. I wish I could wake up like that – Cameron usually just throws my phone at my head and gripes about how much he hates the alarm and immediately goes back to sleep. She’s also being awesome about taking her pills; I hide them in cheese that I’m sure she can’t smell , but she eats them anyways, so far it’s just an anti inflammatory, some low grade antibiotics and an anti-nausea. They made noise about prednisone, but that stuff terrifies me. She took it when she was younger for allergies and she was manic. Also, someone I know took it and it damaged her heart.

Last night on our walk she was greeting strangers really exuberantly, and it dawned on me that if she can’t smell them she has no way of knowing they’re not Cameron. So all she wants to do is walk around outside and look hopefully at people coming up the street towards us. Aside from getting really bored with our block, as she doesn’t want to leave it, just pace up and down in front of the building, its freakin cold out there. So I drag her back in and she does the “daddy’s not home” dance which entails pacing around our apartment and whining, periodically licking the door. The only hope for distraction is the ball, and even that’s not engaging enough. Tonight I’m going to try juggling, maybe 3 balls will work.

So after work yesterday we went to the grocery store for fiber to give honey. They also told us not to give her any antioxidants as they could interfere with the radiation, so we’re pillaging the store trying to find the highest fiber foods with the lowest antioxidant content, except they really don’t print that on the box, do they? Whatever, $150 of fruits and vegetables later we’re half way home when we look at each other and say “DUH – Metamucil” in concert. But I’m pretty sure she will be allergic to Metamucil. I mean, she’s allergic to everything else (all meat besides fish and duck, all grains except quinoa and rice, dairy is ok and so are veggies and fruits), why stop there? But she appears to really like dried apricots, so I think we’re home free. And the vet clarified for us that he meant antioxidant supplements, roughage is a-ok.

I really hope this tumor shrinks soon – I’m running on empty sleep wise (can you tell from wander-blog here?), I think 5 or 6 hours on the last 2 days, and its incredibly pitiful to watch the sleep deprived dog – around 4 am I held her lips up and she took a couple of great big lung bucketfulls of air and fell asleep standing up, and promptly fell over on me. She’s such a good sport about it though, all she wants to do is play, go for walks, play, walk, fetch, licks, snuggle, treats, fetch and begin again. Frankly, I’m handling the lack o sleep worse. Externally, the only weird thing is that she’s breathing loudly and snorting quite a lot. Last night I’m pretty sure this woman on the sidewalk thought she was growling, and gave me a dirty look after she hopped out of the path of honey’s ‘IS THAT MY DADDY FINALLY?!?!?!’ frisk happening near her feet. I’m not even going to bother explaining that, or the “tumor war map” drawn on her face in sharpie. They can all bite me.

(the pic is her asleep on my lap in the truck on the way to LA, winter 2006)

Honey, would you like some fresh arugula?

Honey a few weeks ago, passed out ->

I can’t believe how much writing here is helping me figure stuff out. It’s like two pieces of complimentary information wait until I sit down with a blank word document to attach to each other and all of a sudden, the world is a little more logical. Today’s case in point: apparently Honey needs more fiber in her diet. The vet said we could either give her extra vegetables and fruits or we could put her on a supplement. As soon as I wrote that down and started mentally preparing a list of the foliage I was going to offer her this evening I remembered that she’s been trying to eat grass lately. She used to do this when she was younger, and I was told by our vet in Tallahassee that it was fine as long as she wasn’t throwing it up. She wasn’t, and the grass wasn’t poisonous, so I let her go to town. Here it’s a little different – we live in the middle of Los Angeles and it rains like four times a year. There is NO WAY that grass is clean enough to eat, so I haven’t let her. Those two little tidbits may never have met up if I wasn’t recording everything here.

Now the problem becomes how to get her to actually eat the greenery – maybe she will because she knows her body needs it, but if we have to convince her to do so I think its going to come down to like sauteeing spinach in hot fish oil or some other substance so smelly that it’ll seep into the paint, because the dog can’t smell. Fetch has even changed – she can’t tell which ball (of the 8 matching balls always on the floor) I just threw, or which she had in her mouth last. So she will be determinedly trying to get behind a bookcase, convinced the ball is just out of reach, when the one she’s searching for is at her feet. She’s being an amazingly good sport about it though, I’ve heard stories about cats getting declawed and losing their minds, and I can’t imagine losing SMELL can be less traumatic for a dog, and although it has been happening gradually I expected some personality change. There hasn’t been one, except maybe she sleeps on me a little more, but that’s totally fine by me. On another note, I’m still a terrible juggler but as soon as I pick up three balls there’s suddenly a dog at attention in front of me madly wagging her tail.

<- Honey (at 55lbs) with Thor (weighing significantly more), her big German Shepherd, at the Miccosukee Greenways park in like 2003

1st weekend of radiation treatment

The doggie antinausea pill works wonders - she's eating again :)!!! We had a really good weekend. Saturday we figured out why she’s being so weird about food – apparently at the vet when she’s coming up from the anesthesia, they hand feed her and she now seems to expect the same service at home, thank you. She looks from her bowl to whoever fed her, and back again, but if we walk away she’ll eat. Freakin’ prissy animal wanting to be hand fed. Jeez. So Saturday Cameron had an appointment to get new headshots taken and his photographer has a mastiff (who is beyond sweet) named Beau and a yard and said it would be ok to bring Honey, so the three of us spent a few hours on his yard (which is so incredibly cool I just have no words) and then he took a portrait of Cam and Honey and I. it was weird, I’m not used to being on that side of the camera. And I can honestly say it was the first photo shoot I’ve ever been on that I didn’t have to hold a reflector card or trip the light meter ( I used to LOVE that little popflash, though, and that transistor box looked directly out of ‘back to the future’ – I remember feeling very important when I was asked to press that square red button…). So Honey spent the afternoon laying in the shade next to Beau chewing his ball, then she went with us to a restaurant called Home that has a deck and allows dogs. Its funny, I can tell she’s losing her sense of smell, or it’s at least intermittent. I had salmon and I took the leftovers home and promptly dropped them on the living room floor, and she wouldn’t eat it. It was sad – I know how much she likes fish and she wouldn’t even smell it. That’s got to be a factor in the wanting to be handfed, as well. Poor thing. Saturday night we hung out with our neighbors Max and Maria, with whom Honey is in loooooove. After about 35 minutes, when she had investigated their apartment to her satisfaction, she climbed up on the couch between them, put her head on Maria’s lap and zonked out. She also gave max more kisses than I’ve ever seen her give anyone that wasn’t directly related to me or Cameron.

Saturday night wasn’t so great for sleeping – I think I got around 4 hours, and Sunday we just sat at home, except for a few walks with the neighbor’s dog, a brief foray to the patio out back for a play date and about 4 hours of fetch. It was great. Until I decided to go to bed. Honey is incredibly attached to Cameron – I think she sees him as the great white hunter, and therefore is not entirely at ease until he’s around. This is impressive because she managed to sleep (quite soundly) every night for seven years without Cameron, and has never cared about the location of anyone but him and me at bedtime, as far as I’m aware, but now, if he’s not home when I turn out the lights, we have a problem. Cam closed last night, so he got off around 1 and then went to hang out with some friends. I was totally exhausted and had been battling the urge to go to bed since like 6:30, and around 10 I figured it could turn in. honey had other plans, namely pacing and whining, standing over me and wagging her tail, pacing some more, and standing at the door with her head cocked to one side. This went on until Cameron finally did come home at like 2:30. Needless to say this did not create an environment conducive to sleep. When he did come home she had trouble breathing and I had trouble getting her head in the right position. At one point I decided to sleep on the floor and it almost worked, but my shoulder started flipping out (I’ve broken it twice and if I get cold it will hurt. A lot.) and the last time I looked at the clock it was 6:10. My alarm went off at 7:25. URGH. I was so tired this morning I actually got lost in the train station and wound up coming out at the wrong exit, then I went to Coffee Bean for some espresso and they were training someone, so although I had worked out my order on the way to the shop – “regular latte, two extra shots please” (I even rehearsed it in my head so I wouldn’t get it wrong) they asked me all the follow up questions – do you want flavor? Sugar? Whipped cream? Sprinkles? And I was so out of it I actually got confused.

This morning Honey had another antinausea pill, so hopefully she’ll eat dinner. And Cam said she was happy and bouncy at the vet’s. I’m so grateful she likes the staff, I can’t imagine how awful this would be if her daily trip to get zapped was something that scared her.