Day five.

Skipper has had a bit of a roller coaster sort of day with eating.

Although, the day began with an amazing call, on a Sunday from the specialty vet’s office that did his ultra sound down in Ft. Myers last Wednesday.

Susan, their tech, who we hadn’t met, asked how she could help us.

And I told her what we had been doing and that unfortunately Skipper had not wanted to eat anything today, but I did give him his Nutri Cal and a little bit of yogurt, which he did seem to be willing to try once again, no solids.

I told her that we weren’t sure about when we should give him his pain medication, the quarter pill of the Tramadol. She agreed with me that if he was unable to eat that could mean he was in pain. And so it was decided to start to give him that medication once again. And so at 9:50 A.M. once off the phone with her I did give it to him.

She had taken our email address to send us some other food ideas and even a few recipes.

Hill’s Science diet was on the list plus a canned salmon croquettes recipe simply made with egg and corn meal and for moisture some cottage cheese was recommended, but the yogurt we had and the other we hadn’t.

In the interim I thought I would try the pressure cooked green, no hormones chicken breast again this time with more carrots and brown rice, chopped smaller in the food processor with a little water and a sprinkle of sodium free chicken bouillon, salt is bad for him too, and heated it all for just seconds in the microwave to take the fridge cold temperature off of it…well, he loved it and ate the whole thing and I was thrilled until I read the ingredients after the fact of onion powder being in the chicken bouillon!  Onions are highly toxic for dogs! I was horrified and so I Google it and found that the small bit I sprinkled was not likely to cause him harm, whew!

But that’ll teach me to watch out!

For dinner we had our blackened Tilapia, but took a little of it out before it was seasoned and cooked it in the microwave for seconds again till flaky and Hubby did the oops game for Skipper and he was back on track with it working with eating all that was dropped, YAY!

Fish is a protein and he needs that.

This is more of a trial and error with our little darling, to see what he will eat.

If the pain medication had kicked in for him to eat that is great, and now we will have to make sure he gets it every eight to twelve hours, not just as needed but because we believe he does need it, does that make any sense?

He still is not eating veggies, but is taking the Nutri Cal and more protein with the Greek yogurt.

Tomorrow we will call the local vet to see if we can get him a can or two of the Hill’s diet to try, many of our other four legged kids had been on it and most did not like it sadly.

Meanwhile his favorite carrots, apples and even his Milk bone have not been eaten yesterday or today, and that is worrisome.

He has healthy teeth and does not even have much tartar at all compared to his predecessors who had to have theirs cleaned under anesthetic by his age of ten and seven months plus.

His teeth were deemed healthy on his yearly check up last July and so had he been.

Oddly enough they were all Milk bone junkies.

Well, that was his day so far in a nutshell.

Fortunately, his nights have been restful with him snuggling with both of us and only getting up to get some water.

He has not had any accidents and his plumbing is still functioning fine. No vomiting today at all!

Hubby had taken this picture last night, Skipper actually snuck under his Teddy to cuddle and sleep, the bear was not placed there!

On that note of such hope allow me to be the very first to wish all of you a very happy good night and ask you all to kindly count all your blessings and share all your overages with you know who and we will too!

And next time please be here or be square, ya hear!

PS don’t stop praying it seems to be working, but as we all know prayers are good for most all things these days… so keep the faith peeps! I think my Agnostic self has gone by the wayside…an old expression comes to mind "there are no atheists in foxholes!" I think it's from WWII, maybe one?

In a way fighting lethal ills is similar to going to war, true?

Not so good today...

Yes, I am speaking about our little darling Skipper and it was a darn frustrating day.

He was able to ingest the Nutri Cal, but in reality he didn’t have much choice, since I put it on his roof of his mouth when I found out that he wouldn’t lick it off my finger.

Tough Momma, but even so it is nutritional and later on today we thought we found the ‘key’ to getting him to eat solids by saying “oops!” You see, all of our four legged babies used to keep our floors clean when we would say that, it goes back to when the boys were small, our two legged ones, and so Hubby decided to try it with the chicken that for some reason today did not seem as attractive to him when we served it up in his very clean stainless water dish that we brought in from outside days ago, newly purchased this month.

And so the “oops” worked like a charm for several chicken pieces falling to the floor scenarios.

But he didn’t seem to be perking up so much and he was acting sluggishly so I gave him the last quarter of the Tramadol pill that I had cut up on Wednesday in fourths hoping if he was in pain that this would perk him up.

I eventually brought out the big guns, meaning his love of sharing an apple with me, also supposed to be helpful with digestion. After I washed the skin thoroughly I eat it off and give him pieces from underneath it that over the years he has well enjoyed…but although he was very excited when he saw the apple and jumped up on my lap as he would always do to share…I gave him his first piece and he just stared at it and so I made it a little bit smaller and put it on my finger and he looked seriously sad, he wanted it in his heart but for some reason he couldn’t eat it… right then I wanted to cry!

In my mind it was due to feeling nauseous, which the doctor had said to give him a half of a Pepcid, which he has had over the years many times and would chew it up too without a problem, but now that wasn’t even happening…

This baffled me and for some reason I felt I knew the answer to why his tummy was not well, and so this time Hubby came up with the brilliant idea of chopping up the Pepcid half and putting it in some Nutri Cal on my finger which I promptly did!

He licked off the Nutri Cal this time to my pleasant surprise but somehow he spit the Pepcid out of it! What a talent, hmm?

I finally left my poor sick child alone to rest, but he really wanted to go out with Hubby who was trimming the Bougainvillea down by the water. So how could I resist that and so off he went with his Daddy.

He came in and acted fine but then he threw up his unchewed chicken from all those oopses with his undigested pain medication that had just been given to him… I suppose the oops was on us!

Being the Mom that I am I was now more worried about him have good nutrition and so I Googled something that I was pretty sure I had read a while ago, about dogs being able to have yogurt and how it helped with their digestion too, and sure enough it was there on another reliable site!

Since we do have Greek yogurt in our fridge giving him a taste on my finger was no big deal and so that is what I did, and you know what happened?

He ate it, and loved it! So I gave him more.

I forgot to Google on how much he should have though.

Dogs, not unlike people have digestive systems that with some things like Probiotics are good for them too!

Now during dinner I tried some mushed sweet potato and cauliflower too for him in his stainless bowl and he still wasn’t interested in those either but Hubby thought he would again try the “oops’ with some chicken and this time it did not work, too soon I suspect, Skipper has a decent memory, but I did put some yogurt on my mashed potato this time not sweet, and I told Hubby to give Skipper some yogurt on his finger and he said that he would and he thought to chop some chicken into it and Skipper licked the yogurt around the chicken, I guess since that wasn’t too Kosher, kidding!

 Milk and meat?

Never mind.

Now all we can do is hope tomorrow will be a better day for him and that we can get some more solids in him.

Without nutrition… you know the rest…

On that note with please God give us all some hope, allow me to be the very first to wish you all a very happy good night and ask all of you to kindly count all your blessings and share those overages with you know who and we will too!

And next time please be here or be square, ya hear!

Groceries to stock when hunkering down...

...Are a foregone conclusion, and it is not unusual for many of us when we live far from our usual basic needs we all have had a tendency to stock up.

Now we cannot claim that as our reasoning for any of our super purchases of the last few weeks except for the need to go out less and not eat out at all… save some bucks there, hmm?

And so Hubby went to our nearby Publix, less than two miles away, and purchased enough food to last us quite some time and he even cut the lawn today. I on the other hand took it upon myself to make Skipper’s favorite things as clean as the washing machine can make them, i.e. his soft stuffed toys as well as his Mommy blankets, translation: imitation sheepskin, in white of course just like him. In fact as a pup/baby he would fall asleep on them and with his eyes closed he would become practically invisible!

He has a stuffed Teddy bear, frog, bunny and cat that used to meow, as well as his rope toys, one store bought and one Hubby made. But that’s not to say all of his Frisbees and balls and hydrant and fishy and on and on and on… all of his toys to enjoy whenever he feels the desire!

Who says the four legged ones don’t get spoiled like two legged ones?

Actually, they were added to over the years from his predecessors of course, thus the quantity.

Just imagine if we did have grand-kids? HA!

Hubby brought home from Publix their green brand of chicken breasts without hormones or any bad stuff and I put the two into the pressure cooker and with three Brussel sprouts heated in the microwave I gave our little darling, once all was cool, enough for him, which turned out to be a very large helping.

I was thrilled to see him eat so well, he actually consumed about half of the one chicken breast!

I read earlier in the day about vegetables that were healthy for dogs http://www.dogchannel.com/dog-food/vegetables-for-dogs.aspx and the Brussel sprouts showed up with broccoli, cauliflower, edaname, avocados, carrots, peas, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, potatoes and asparagus! All things we enjoy eating too and many I did not know were safe for our four legged kids, except for the carrots, really!

A smorgasbord of choices now and so when we had another shared sweet potato with our dinner we both took some of it for Skipper, but he seemed to still be full from his healthy lunch.

Oh they list fruits too http://www.dogchannel.com/dog-food/fruits-for-dogs.aspx that I had not been so aware of either, apples yes, but not the others.

It appears that there is a direct connection between Skipper’s appetite and him needing his pain medication, a quarter of his Tramadol pill.

Hubby and I have a difference of opinion on how to tell that Skipper is in pain. I somehow can tell by how he moves and today when I went to tickle his side he yelped and so he got his every eight to twelve hour medication which he hadn’t had since yesterday at around noon.

He never complains; even so I am not clear on how to tell.

You see, he has been eating what we fix for him and his personal plumbing appears to be working fine without any accidents or blood appearing in them, he has asked to go out when he needs to. He’s sleeping quite a bit more than he has been in his most recent past, other than that he is doing okay!

Crazy!

If we had never gone to those two DVMs I would think it was just his older age catching up to him; after all he is nearly eleven, if you go by the old method of determining age that would make him nearly seventy-seven, true?

So sure he’s stiff when he gets up from his naps, but who isn’t?

He is as we so boldly say hangin’ in there!

And that’s all one can do in this sorrowful position that he is in, sadly.

We both love this little guy so much and he is so brave and powerful in the aspect of being so loving as usual to us with licks and snuggles…

It is sooooooooo easy to be in denial or to think that Wednesday’s diagnosis was just a horrible nightmare of a mistake?

Not unlike most that get these reports from any type of a doctor, we always hope it is untrue, and sometimes mistakes are made… perhaps?

On that note of going nearly off the deep end with denial, allow me to be the very first to wish all of you a very happy good night and ask you all to kindly count all your blessings and share those overages with you know who and we will too !

And next time please be here or be square, ya hear!

When people sit vigil with a loved one...

...Whether they are two legged or four legged, if you love that someone it is difficult knowing that their life, to quote a cancer.com commercial in reverse that they do have an expiration date... but somehow we all do, don’t we?

Sure no one lives forever; yet?

There are a few states in America that now allow people to die with dignity if the illness is terminal:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_the_United_States, and that could be due to Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kevorkian legacy and reasoning that like love, no one should have the power to tell you when it is time to end your life.

Sorry, lousy analogy, maybe not…but my point was with using love as a comparison is that NO ONE has the right to tell you who to love or marry i.e. who your sexual preferences should be.

In other words freedom of choice for those two too.

Why animals, actually, our four-legged kids for decades as far as I know we as their parents have had that privilege to not make a suffering pained friend/pet have to continue on with that horrible quality of life, and we were and are allowed to chose for them that finality.

For in that case we have been more humane than to our own human counterparts; does that make any sense?

Of course no one is assuming or lining up to become the next generation of Kevorkian’s.

All I am saying is that if there is a road of no return that faces us perhaps we too should weigh in on if our quality of life is the way we want to continue or are we going on to please our loved ones, not ourselves, get that?

Sure some feel it is a selfish act, not unlike many who commit suicide for mentally miserable existences that to them is also a form of fatality in their personal quality of life situations too… but there we all go judgmental again… And yes the word in the word component in being ‘judgmental’ is just that asking the other unasked question when we perform this action are we perhaps too emotional to decide for others, hmm? I think…maybe? Even for ourselves?

But it is so true that no one really knows better than one’s self for one’s self and that ‘they’ say is when we have all our faculties, but does anyone have logical thinking in truly emotional situations?

We would all have to be cold hard-heartless thinkers with the ability to step away from the problem in front of them, true?

Maudlin!

So so sorry!

Living with so ill a patient these days, even our loving pet/child of ten years  and seven months makes one become retrospective.

The crazy thing is now that he is eating that delicacy of sardines and brown rice with chopped carrots, several times today… he is acting not that sick, he even has been able to perform his daily doody that was smaller but healthy looking according Hubby’s reporting on such things…ha!

Come on people; don’t tell me you haven’t discussed potty things about all your kids and yes I do mean the two and four legged ones included!

When they were ill mostly or still being potty trained or on and on and on…?

Children are children and don’t any of you forget it and that is why…Skipper having a better day is also causing his Mom and Dad to have one too.

He is a snuggler in our bed taking turns with both of us given us his warmth from side to side and allowing us the joy of his love. He loves his Dad though and most of the day he shares the recliner with him, although when Hubby goes anywhere he is still a Mamma’s boy and ends up with me on mine!

Each day is a joy for us and isn’t that what life is all about?

He still wags that mighty tail with joy when we praise him or he sees us coming in from another room.

Oddly enough he hears things that we don’t still, but sure they all do and he will bark and ask to go out and he does with his Daddy usually…

This is so crazy, he is acting so normal, if it wasn’t for the two different vets giving the same diagnosis I would think they made a BIG mistake; now I ask is that denial?

Wishful thinking maybe, guilty…really, really, really GUILTY!

On that note of constant hope allow me to be the very first to wish all of you a very happy good night and ask you all to kindly count all your blessings and share those overages with you who and we will too and next time please be here or be square, ya hear!

Next time please be here or be square, ya hear!

PS Perhaps those prayers are working, so don’t stop!

Pray for SKIPPER!

Slapped way too hard in the face today!

Sadly we have been taking Skipper for tests all day! He has cancer that if operated on will spread or make him hemorrhage. Horrible!

So very upsetting so we are treating him as if we are running a Hospice with pain meds and vitamins and lotsa love.

So shocked and saddened by this news, yesterday he was fine and today...he was stopping in his tracks as if posing but with his head and tail down unable to move and not eating. He had blood work X-rays in Punta Gorda and then we were sent to Ft. Myers for an ultrasound.

They said his spleen could be removed and that his two blood works at the two offices had him being severely anemic and both the X-ray and the ultra sound showed growths in his stomach and liver that were significantly large and that it could metastasize by being touched even by biopsy. He had lost weight but not too significant. And so we picked up Nutri Cal for him to maybe eat and with vitamins in it too and they gave us Tramadol for him to take every eight hours for pain... He is home with us, since the percentages for him to survive any invasive surgeries/ideas were not good. We did consider less invasive procedures with needle biopsy but that too had a chance of not getting the right growth and getting the right result or worse nicking it spreading it throughout him causing  hemorrhaging!

 Long day... I have cancelled all doctors appointments today and tomorrow and no rehab until we know what’s what. He misses us too much and we really feel as if we should/could not leave him alone…
This is breaking both of our hearts, but sadly we have been through it too many times before…

Less than average ... although...

Yada, yada, yada…

I again am not in the best of my health, which is odd coming from someone who has Multiple Sclerosis as well as spondylosis, spinal arthritis as well as too many other ills etc...

But as we all say in the game some days are better than others, or a tried and true one that most often gets a giggle usually, “if I complain who would listen anyway?” Bud dump bum.

Sure, sure, people say that they are sorry to hear you’re not well and I say why are you sorry, you didn’t cause it or give it to me, did you? And then I giggle usually, lightening the room’s atmosphere.
Many people do mean well and sincerely ask how you are today when they see you, and it behooves me to just say fine, but if they are not careful I might tell them how I really am… in way too great detail!

Oh joy, what fun being chronically ill not fatally ill, and yes we of the chronic types of ills can make jokes, although, come to think of it… MS is progressive and there is still no known cure, but I should not harp on the truth, with so many fatal diseases surrounding us these days…I must grin and bear it and be more concerned with others as all humans should rightfully be by nature of caring and love of all human beings on this planet, and yes I will admit again we are our brothers’ keepers…

What the heck, you know me, I can never keep what’s bugging me to myself and this is MY venue for that self expression of that non-pretty part of my human make-up…

Today, my ill of the day is…my BACK, my lower back, yes my sit down part on all of our bottoms, that behind, our derriere, is bum, Oy vey the tukis tushy, buttocks, and gluteus maximus, you get the idea and it has been painful most of the night and day too, and making maneuvering that is walking around quite painful!

The other odder and not something I ever recall having is a clear bubble in the top of my right eye in the white of it under the lid.

At first I thought it was part of my misplaced contact lens in that eye, but alas the contact lens was whole and just not placed properly. Once it was fixed I was able to see just fine, but the ominous clear bubble above the iris off to the right under my lid was quite disturbing and without too much thought I called the eye doctor’s office and so I have an appointment for tomorrow and yes it was late this afternoon when it was noticed… but then I did Google this obscure anomaly in my eye’s global hemisphere that had not been there ever before and believe me when I say I have had it all in these eyes and I am very lucky so far with them…According to what I read it is caused by either allergies or sun and is nothing to worry about, it is a benign issue. But it did not say what to do about it other than to continue with my dry eye drops and wear wrap around sunglasses, done and done always!

So I suppose I will cancel my eye doc appointment, since the only caveat was if it caused multiple ones, bubbles, of the same and affected my eyesight and so far so good…

On that note of what the heck, allow me to be the very first to wish all of you a very happy good night and ask all of you to kindly count all your blessings and share all your overages with you know who and we will too!

And next time please be here or be square, ya hear!

We had an uneventful day...yep!

Sorry to bother any of you, but today everything that we planned on doing went off without a hitch, and that is a small miracle for someone like me.

Some would be in awe, others would say “WOW”, and yet some others might just say, so what’s the big deal, really?

And that would be true if I was not the cause of Murphy’s Law Days way too often… shush perhaps I said that too loud or too boldly?

Being a jinx I do believe started when I was only a toddler.

Many have happy childhoods without any real eventful happenings happening while just a small tot?

But no not me…

At the mere age of four I was a victim of a swinging accident, get your minds out of the gutter, in this case it is an actual park swing that a child is placed on to go to and fro, got it?

Now here’s the deal, I was being swung by a young girl who took me there to have fun while our parents were visiting one another, I do believe this was in a suburb of Washington D.C.

You see, her dad and mine had gone to high school together in good ole NJ, but somehow due to him becoming a lawyer and accountant they ended up there.

That’s all I know, except when her father got old that same brilliant man was a victim of Alzheimer’s and when my father went to visit his dear old friend, he came home quite disturbed by his friend not even knowing himself in a mirror and this was way back in the 1970’s when many of us were not that familiar with this horrible mind stealing disease…

Any-who, my accident occurred at their nearby playground twenty years earlier.

I was thrilled to be pushed so high and as a child I was probably guilty, as so many of us are of saying higher, higher and so she did…

The next is a wee bit fuzzy; all I remember was severe ouching and a very bloody left knee. She either ran to get my parents or they heard me scream or we both went, that part is a wee bit unclear since it was so long ago but anyway somehow we ended up in a doctor’s office who had no anesthetic to numb my knee and my Mom my Dad and the lunatic held me tight as he stitched my knee with just four stitches I was told, Geez that was so awful and for a four year old to remember it must have been really traumatic, hmm?

All these years I told myself they had no choice it was not a hospital setting, and who knows if it was a ‘real’ doctor, my scar was slight as the years passed on… but somehow I felt that was just the beginning of my life as a JINX in so many ways…!

Now many of you would say you were young and didn’t know any better and higher and higher is what we all said at one time or another, but I ask any of you, did you come crashing down into a bunch of gravel very far from the swing set you were swinging on?

I think not!

A bit of a mystery to this day…

I leave you with that thought to think about and now on that note allow me to be the very first to wish all of you a very happy good night and ask you all to kindly count all your blessings and share all your overages with you know who and we will too!

And next time please be here or be square, ya hear!

PS This was our itinerary for the day rehab exercise, 15 minutes on the bike and one hundred reps on the total gym, handed out avocados from our tree, then on to Cracker Barrel for a dual trout lunch, Hubby and me both had it and loved it, he had coffee with sugar with his and I had my usual of iced unsweet tea with lemons on the side.

Then lastly off to Tractor Supply to pick up our thirty-five lbs of wild bird feed.

Then home! Ta Da!

UNEVENTFUL! YAY!

Although, Hubby did say that we had missed their bird seed sale by just one day! There you go, a JINX again, BOO HOO!