Dog Appreciation

Sregular position in photos, he’s kind of a couch-potato type dog. LOL! We lovingly call him a cat-dog – likes to sit on your lap, etc.)

Dog Update

Just so I don’t leave you hanging about the dog…

Friday was a really bad day. I went to see him in the morning – he was still not doing well, getting worse. He looked horrible. I looked in his face and silently pleaded with him to hang on and get better. I talked to the vet over the phone in the afternoon and he suggested one last treatment before we gave up. All along we were treating his problems like they were ulcers – except the medication that should have worked simply wasn’t working. If it wasn’t ulcers – the other options it could be was cancer or inflammatory disease. He suggested giving him steroids to see if it helped.

A few hours later, I stopped in to see him. I brought the kids with me because I wasn’t sure if they were ever going to see him again, and I was getting ready to tell them to say goodbye to him. But when they brought him out, they put him on the floor, and he ran over to us, wagging his tail. Before he was shaking non-stop (most likely from pain), but he was hardly shaking at all – this was only hours after they started him on the new treatment. I couldn’t believe my eyes. We took him outside so he could pee, he did, then pulled towards the car like he wanted to go HOME. This is not the behavior of a dog that is giving up!

The next morning he looked even better. They told me if everything continued as is, he could come home that night. I couldn’t believe it! The dog had literally come back from the dead. That night I brought him (and about a dozen medications LOL!) home and he’s pretty much back to his old self now.

I’ve been told this is not a “cure” – his stomach is diseased. What this buys us is some more time with him. Whether it’s cancer or inflammatory disease, the steroids will eventually stop working. In the meantime, we are so glad to have him back with us for however long we can keep him. I still don’t know how I’m going to cope when the eventuality comes. He’s like my daemon / animal spirit. He’s always by my side and I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to say goodbye to him.

Flower 2

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Flowers

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ood thing I still have a just a few more photographs from vacation to post. At the moment I’m completely bed bound. I threw my back out on Friday, it was just about tolerable until last night (Saturday). I didn’t sleep well, was in pain for most of the night that just got worse and worse. Thankfully there’s an “After Hours” doctor office nearby, so even though it was a Sunday morning, I was able to get in and seen by a doctor (or at least a nurse practitioner as the case may be). Lots of anti-inflamatory meds, pain meds, and muscle relaxers, and my back is again just tolerable on pain. I’m not quite sure how I’ll survive tomorrow. I still have tons of work piled up from vacation, so it’s not like I can just dose up on pain meds and be all set. They totally knocked me out today. But even just sitting doesn’t ease the back pain.

Butterfly

Twikipedia, they’re supposedly seen across the U.S. but I can’t remember the last one I saw that wasn’t in some kind of “butterfly zoo.”

Another unique-to-this-area insect: Lightening Bugs / Fireflies. We used to see them every summer when I was a kid in NY, but I haven’t seen one in so long. I don’t believe there are any in Utah at all. I was really psyched to have Rachel and Zachary see them and chase after and even catch a few. (We let them go after a few minutes of watching them up close).