Sheila's LiveJournal

The weather has been nice here in the mornings, with a healthy layer of marine fog that keep the temperature down, at least until noon. The greys and I have taken advantage of this for long walks along the bluffs, admiring the ocean views and the passing joggers and people walking dogs. Needless to say, the greys love this part! But while Jack is friendly to all, two-leggeds and four, Annie is afraid of little dogs.

I’m not sure why this is. I’ve seen her go snarly mouth to snarly mouth with a mean-looking Rottweiler, and pitbulls don’t faze her. I had to take her home from the dog-park once because she thought she could answer a pit’s challenge. But little dogs make her hide behind me until the menace has gone away.

Meanwhile, Jack has started to bark when somebody he doesn’t know comes to my door. To understand the magnitude of this, you have to know that greys don’t make great watch-dogs, and they usually don’t bother barking. Too much energy, maybe? They’re both nine now, Jack edging towards nine-and-a-half, so they’re officially seniors – although greys can live to be twelve to fourteen with good care, and I know of at least two that made it to within days of their sixteenth birthdays. They’re basically “little dogs on long legs” according to one vet!

So I’m giving them a break from playing therapy dog at the hospice because I’ve noticed Jack is showing signs of stress lately, for some reason. If I take Annie without him, she’ll sulk and he’ll be heart-broken. He wasn’t too thrilled with the last Meet n’ Greet we did for Greyhound Rescue, either. (Since his devastating illness a couple of years ago, I’ve kept a close watch on where he carries his tail.) I think his energy level is just a lot lower than normal.

Now, if only Nicky the Resident Feline God will quit bossing them about....

I had been home from ConDor for about thirty minutes, the dogs --who'd been vacationing with other greys for the weekend -- were with me. I petted Nicky, and opened the balcony door so he could go out and prowl around since he'd been shut in the condo all weekend.

As I said, thirty minutes. Max.

I turned around to go into the bathroom (I was unloading the suitcase) and there on the floor was a dead sparrow surrounded by feathers that wasn't there two minutes ago.

"Hah. Welcome home, mom. This is what I think of your absence. Now try to figure out how I caught a sparrow on the balcony so quickly!"

The greys and I went down to a DoubleTree Hotel in San Diego this weekend, so they could play “anatomy subjects” for veterinarians who're learning how to do acupuncture on animals. Every year, the International Veterinary Acupuncture Society runs four five-day sessions, each a month apart for up to a hundred vets in various locations around the country, and this year was San Diego's turn again. The vets have course work all day, with practice sessions for three hours each afternoon. That's where the greys come in. The call goes out to the local greyhound rescue organizations for dogs the vets can practice on. At regular intervals, the teachers select a dog and demonstrate actual acupuncture to the assembled students.

Jack and Annie and I have done this before (and before them, my previous grey, Rosie, did her turn). The vets need a large number of dogs able to stand on an examining table for twenty minutes at a time while five or six vets feel and prod them to discover pressure points. There are usually eight to ten “stations” working at a time, each with a teacher guiding the students. Greys are very good for this because they're so patient and they're skinny enough that the students find it easy to identify parts of the anatomy. After a couple of sessions, at most, the dogs change out and get to rest in an X-pen enclosure with other greys, drink water, eat snacks, and get told what good dogs they are.

Annie ended up doing four twenty minute sessions (with breaks between each two, then a longer pause before starting again), but Jack only managed one before exhibiting signs of stress. He's been rather fragile since his illness last year, and I watch him closely to make sure he doesn't overdo it. In fact, I wasn't sure until the moment that he'd be ready to help at all. But he loves people so much, he'd probably have hopped right back up on the table if I'd asked him. In return for all this, the organization makes a hefty donation to greyhound rescue.

It's nice to think that Jack and Annie helped some vets learn how to help other animals in pain. It's wonderful that grey anatomy makes it easy for beginners to learn on. But as I asked one young vet, “How on earth are you going to translate this to a big Saint Bernard or an overweight Lab?” “Darned if I know!” she said.

I'm beginning to think that I'm some kind of jinx, bringing down disaster on the places around the world I've recently visited. I won't count Rwanda, because their troubles had all happened before I got there. But how do you explain Kenya – that relatively democratic, reasonably well-governed nation – erupting in civil unrest just a few weeks after I visited? And how about Tibet? Certainly, I was there over a year before the normally peaceful monks started rebelling and people were getting themselves manhandled or worse on the streets of Lhasa.

And now we have Sichuan Province in trouble.

Nitpickers and other detail-oriented folk will no doubt point out that two of the previously mentioned disasters were man-made, but that an earthquake is An Act of God (or Mother Nature, if you prefer). But we can't dismiss the fact that I was there in Sichuan. And – worse news for all you Nature Conservancy folk, or members of the WWF or PETA – I visited the Wolong Panda Reserve while I was in Chengdu. (Luckily, reports say the pandas are okay, all eighty adults and assorted cubs, along with their human staff, just a trifle shaken up.)

Coincidence? I don't think so!

Life with a sick dog seems to have gotten away from me lately. Jack has been sick since the end of May and we still haven't identified the cause. It's most likely a tick-borne disease, but not any of the most obvious ones: lyme, rocky mountain spotted, and so on. We have a daily regimen of pills that take time to crush, add to food, persuade reluctant dog to ingest, discourage eager other dog from sampling, and this we do twice a day. On top of that, he is supposed to be eating two cans per day of super-duper high protein food bought at great expense from the vet – in addition to his regular food. He is so skinny! Greyhounds are naturally the poster children for anorexia , but Jack went down to a walking anatomy lesson where you could count every rib and see the sharp angles of his pelvis and shoulder blades.
                                                                                               
For a while, I had to feed him through a feeding tube because he had no appetite and the lymph glands in his neck were swollen so badly it hurt him to swallow. At least it was easy to get the meds in that way.  He was taking prednisone as well as heavy duty antibiotics to keep the inflammation down. Any effort to decrease the dose of pred made his temperature shoot up and the lymphs swell again. But he progressed beyond that to eating by himself and the specialist actually discussed taking the tube out. He decided to wait a little longer till Jack had put some of the lost weight back on. Jack had other ideas. One evening he cut the tube in half with his teeth, necessitating a quick trip to the emergency hospital. “You'd better take the rest of it out,” I told the specialist, “before he does.” But the vet hesitated – just in case we might need it later. Well, last week, Jack decided “later” had come as far as he was concerned. He not only pulled the whole thing out, he proceeded to chew it up to make sure the vet didn't put it back. Another night trip to the emergency hospital. (Can you hear the cash register ringing in the background here?)
                                                                                               
This time he had an over night stay, x-rays, barium feeds, and another biopsy of the lymphs. The latest samples go to North Carolina State University veterinary school where one of the foremost experts in tick-borne diseases works. (Previous samples went to places in Colorado and Arizona.) This time, the experts have apparently conferred by phone (guess who will be picking up the long-distance tabs?) and think there's a chance it's a rare disease, hardly ever seen on the west coast. In veterinary matters, “rare” translates into “expensive, new-fangled antibiotics which may or may not work.” Jack's primary vet did some research and called me to say that coyotes might be the vector for transmission of this disease. We certainly do visit coyote country fairly regularly, and I've even seen coyotes right here in Long Beach, in the flood channels along the interstates. So it's entirely possible that's what's making him so sick.
                                                                                             
I've given up tracking how much this is costing me. Any time you take an animal to the vet, you know it's going to cost at least as much as one of your own visits to the doctor. And any time your pet visits a facility where “specialists” are listed, you might as well just close your eyes and hand over your credit card. Yes, I have pet insurance (VPI, for those of you who know), but I doubt it will pay back anywhere near what I've spent so far. And to think that an official of the AKC once called ex-racing greyhounds “track trash” and warned that any breeding between them and the kind the AKC sanctions would disqualify the offspring from registration. Jack is one gold-plated piece of trash, is all I can say!