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.

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.