Yay for Dogger!

I wasn’t completely useless over the weekend, I got a second wind Sunday evening and bathed Dogger and vacuumed and laundered everything that touches her, up to and including pillow covers that I’m pretty sure I have never washed. I didn’t want them to feel left out.

Speaking of Dogger, this weekend was her One year Addisons Disease anniversary! I knew it was coming up but I wasn’t sure when specifically as there are some things I prefer not to dwell on and I don’t think about it as much anymore. A story in the Sunday paper about the Krispy Kreme run reminded me that last year I had a dying Dogger in the back seat and was forced to contend with the non-fun non-run Krispy crowds blocking access to my vet and then the same damnable crowds complicating the trip to the emergency vets where they told me why Dogger couldn’t walk and why she was shedding the way she had been and why she was dying and exactly how much it was going to run me for Dogger to get her groove back. They of course gave me only two options and neither was acceptable. It killed me that I was being forced to decided between her quantity of life verses my quality of life. It will only run a couple hundred dollars a month indefinitely! It didn’t seem fair and either way I was going to be the bad guy.

Thankfully, through the internet and a Canine Addison's’  Yahoo group I found a third option, Tiffany Natural Pharmacy , the worlds best compounding pharmacy and a year later my Dogger is just like all the other dogs, well, almost, she’s just like all the other dogs who have bad knees. Post -AD we did have to stop going to the dog park and that was a major change in lifestyle for the both of us but it was getting too crowded and Dogger didn’t need the added stress. She also didn’t need to get into as many fights as she was getting into and the more I stressed about that the more stress she felt and she isn’t supposed to be stressed. I tried to step down our every-day-for-two-years dog park habit by using the small dog park ( too small, too many small dogs) and going at times I knew the park was not as used, but at the end, it just wasn’t worth it. We did go one final time on March 21, in the rain and on the leash but it was just so pathetic that I made the decision to go cold turkey.

So we started back on our walks and going to the baseball diamond, where on July 13th she tore a ligament in her knee and we stopped going anywhere at all. For the second time in a year the doctor gave me an ultimatum - Absurdly expensive treatment or euthanasia and for the second time I said Neither and searched online for a third choice. Mercifully, I got lucky again and with a lot of work, Dogger is still with us. She is doing much, much. much better and is well on the road to recovery - No more off leash time for her or long walks, but I think she’s okay with it and while it makes me a little sad to remember her running and cavorting those scenes always end with her running towards me in slow-mo and then yelping and falling. Today instead of imagining her running towards me at full gallop, I think of us strolling, together.