Good Stress

Ember, Fergus, Reba, Chief, Flicker, and Sparky.

[Happy laundry day! I've developed a habit of posting lists of some sort or other on Tuesdays. Today it's a list of names, those of the puppies in the latest Yasashiikuma litter, seen above outdoors on a recent sunny afternoon. Beats me who all those hominids are, but the human puppy sure has a sweet face.

Below is the post I wrote yesterday. My cold rendered it a bit blasé in tone, and I'm not so sure I can improve it by much today -- isn't it naptime anyway? Also, I'm much less nervous and anxious than the first time around. That reminds me of a humorous, comforting book I read a quarter-century ago, while I was pregnant. It was written by a pediatrician and father of grown children, and had a title like How to Treat Your First Child as Though it Were Your Second. Anyway, here's yesterday's news today.]

My blogfriend Goodbear had a crappy start to her weekend, a whole pile of things beyond her control, most of them handleable if dealt with one by one, but not when they all come flying at her together like Shreddies out of a cereal box. She also said something about being crazy. I worried about that last remark, coming as it did out of left field (Goodbear is an eminently sane creature). I suggested that maybe she was just stressed, not crazy: stressed by good things (plans for a new puppy) as well as bad (large creepy spiders, creepy large spyers…).

Goodbear, by the way, is the first blogfriend (well okay, besides Shelley) to know E.g. and my good-stress secret. I’ve made her wait for further news because until yesterday we didn’t know which furball we’d be getting. Have I let the secret out yet?

Shelley is very careful to match her puppies with the most suitable families. She asks prospective owners lots of questions about their lifestyle and their reasons for getting a dog, observes her puppies carefully, and has temperament testing done when they’re seven weeks old. Last night, Shelley called us with her decision: It’s a boy! We’re getting Fergus.

E.g. and I, who have been tuning in since before they were born, have always thought Fergus the handsomest of this litter. If you go here, you can see his head with its perfect centre line through the brown, looking to me like a great-Gatsby-era gent with oiled hair. The markings look a little different now that he’s bigger, but he still has a neat-and-tidy look about him.

Shelley chose Fergus for us because he seems pretty laid back, and won’t dominate Cai, who is already somewhat submissive. Apparently it was a tough decision, however. Shelley had a hard time deciding whether or not Fergus would be a show dog! She even told E.g. that if we’d like, she could show Fergus to get his puppy points before we have him neutered. I’m undecided about that, since I know nothing about dog shows… but since I’ve always flown the flag of dilletantism, it might be interesting to learn something about it. We’ll see.

Anyway, getting back to the current time, we’ll be going up on Saturday to pick up Fergus. We’ll get to know him for two weeks or so, and then return him to Shelley to be boarded while we’re on vacation in Paris. We know he’ll be in good hands!

E.g. hasn’t yet decided whether we’ll change his puppy name (Cai’s puppy name was Jasper). She had thought of “Robin” if we got a boy, but she likes the name Fergus, so we may keep it. I’m sure the decision will be made by the end of the week.

 

When Fancy is Turning

I read someplace once that February 14 was chosen as a celebratory day for lovers because it was observed that in mid-February, songbirds start exhibiting mating behaviour. And indeed, on February 11 I saw, on one end of the fallen log that lies just inside the fence on the far side of the parkette in front of our building to the north, a bird. A male house sparrow he was, looking pretty small on that log, but proudly shaking his fanned tailfeathers like a peacock on espresso. “Here I am, ladies! Your chick magnet has arrived! Take a number!” I can vouch that in mid-February, the sight of that much cheery sex appeal brought a smile to more than one species.

Six weeks later, the filthy old snow is still ebbing from parks and soccer fields and front yards. The sidewalks are mostly clear, though, and poggles — oops, I mean Cai — and I can go walkies at a good clip now.

Since his leg owie, when he was limping from a pulled ligament, Cai has been learning to walk nicely on leash. That’s because Mummy dislikes pratfalls. So we’ve been going up street and through alley and along river, noting gradual changes as Spring comes to the city.

Some of these changes are happening throughout the province: the Red-winged Blackbirds, for example, are returning to the still-frozen ponds. (And now, thanks to the March 12 and March 24 entries of The Marvellous in Nature, I know what they’re eating!)

Other changes are distinctly urban. We’ve seen people hacking at the ice in their backyards and banishing winter over the fence. The other day, the storm sewers were full, flowing merrily merrily down the street. Bundle-buggies are out again in  full force.

Finally, there are changes  that belong to the Little World — the world of little creatures, or personal significance, or both. For instance, earlier this week, I went out for walkies without needing either mittens or four layers of shirt-and-sweater under my parka. On the way back, Cai and I surprised a female sparrow bathing in a real live puddle. (Maybe she was getting ready for a date with Mr. Espresso Peacock, who knows?) Today, I saw a baby’s mitten placed on a fence picket, resembling a tiny pink cactus, and it looked out of place.

And yesterday, fresh in from walkies, we heard a familiar yipping in the back field. Cai looked up in barklove (thanks for the phrase, Aged Cat!), and I said sure, we’d go out again. It was his best friend, the little Jack Russell from the next building. With the combination of lousy weather and his play restrictions, Cai hadn’t seen her for a few weeks. We went out to say hello, and there was the JR, racing around all nudie, freed at last from her faux-sheepskin jacket.

Journey to the Centre of the Dog

This is my fourth and final entry focussing on canine megaesophagus. Today’s posting might be subtitled, Fun With Gravity.

After ruling out secondary causes, the veterinarian’s diagnosis was Canine Idiopathic Megaesophagus, which is apparently Latin for “the dog’s sick for some reason.” So, no meds, no thoracic surgery, just attention to the laws of math and physics was open to us as treatment for poggles. This arts-major momma has had to learn about…

1. Probability. The more a coin is flipped, the greater the chance of seeing its head. For an m.e. dog, the more often he’s fed, the greater the chance of food seeing his stomach. We began with five small meals a day: two in the morning, one at noon, and two in the evening. Also, the higher the quality of the food, the more nutrition the pooch will get. We were told to stay with puppy food for as long as he was regurgitating, because its protein content is higher than that of adult food. The vet even suggested a stint with cat food, the protein level of which is so high that it makes normal dogs sick.

2. Friction. Dry food doesn’t slide well in a damp digestive tube. We soak the kibble to mush. We used to place a day’s worth of kibble and tapwater in a lidded container in the fridge overnight, but lately have been simply pouring boiling water over a meal’s worth, right in the food dish, and covering it with a plate while we go out for a romp.

3. Density. Soaked kibble has a higher density than dry kibble, and so the force of gravity on it is higher. (Tinned food is just as dense, and makes a tasty addition to the kibble porridge.) Just as important to note is that kibble gives water a higher density, too. Our puppy would toss most of his drinking water, so all the liquid added to his food helps enormously in keeping him hydrated. 

4. Geometry. The closer to a ninety-degree angle something is, the longer the distance that gravity gets to work its magic. Sleeping in the papasan helps keep our dog’s head up and his food down. But long before we bought the oversized doggie doughnut bed, we trained our Cardigan to stand with his front feet on a stepstool and eat his food out of a bowl on a yet-higher shelf, giving him an angle somewhere between 45 and 60 degrees. At first we stood behind him with our hands on his ribcage, till he got used to the odd position. Then, as soon as he finished a meal, one of us would pick him up, dandle him upright on her lap, and stroke his back and tummy till he let out a good belch. (Sometimes I belched first, as a hint.) Because he didn’t like this last manouevre too much, we started getting him to remain with his front feet on the stepstool till he burped. Over time, he got the idea, and would just stay there himself, licking his emptied bowl and thinking happy unbarfy thoughts. Before reaching that level of expertise, his most celebrated lunch was probably the one on the Lion’s Head lookout on the Bruce Peninsula, where a group of puzzled rock climbers got to watch two middle-aged lady hikers burping a corgi.

5. Temperature. Heat makes things move. If poggles is panting, he’ll toss his drinking water faster than you can say get-the-towels. We try to build in cool-down time before letting him quench his thirst. Similarly, we’ve learned to feed him after, not before, a play session. If he eats just before going out, he gets taken for a nice calm walk instead of a vigorous game of fetch.

6. Praise. Okay, so praise isn’t a law of physics, but it’s definitely a rule of life. I was crestfallen to realize that treat-based training was suddenly a no-go; without treats, the clicker is just noise pollution. So I praised. I praised him for going potty outside, for catching a ball, for being quiet, for coming when I called, for not pulling on the leash, for finding his toy in the snow, for learning how to use stairs, for being nice to the cat… I’m sure he still thinks “good boy” is his middle name. We did try one military-style obedience course, but I’m unconvinced that growling at your dog is the way to go. It’s much more fun to stick to praising him when he’s doing something right.

It’s been exactly a year now since the diagnosis, and management of our dog’s condition has gotten easier over time. We’re extremely lucky; in some dogs, the condition worsens. Our pup is one of the few who has somehow managed to compensate, or maybe his esophagus has improved its elasticity — but I’m not going to order another x-ray to find out.

He still eats on an angle, but we were down to three meals for some time, and lately he’s made it clear that breakfast and supper are enough. We still give him well-watered mushy kibble, but lately he’s been getting dog biscuits as well. (Only at home, though; he needed antibiotics that time he strained at the leash and snorted bicky bits up his nose.) We still try to ensure a cool-down period; after about fifteen minutes of hard play outside, he’ll start tossing little blats of water (saliva-sweat?) in which biscuit crumbs are visible, but that’s usually all we see now.

I could try treat-training him again to see how that goes, but so far I’ve been too lazy. Seeing my dog generally happy, mostly healthy, and usually pretty-well behaved is good enough for now.

Mega What?

The little guy was a month old when we first met him. At that point he was indistinguishable from his littermates, a piebald collection of swollen bellies and stubby whiptails. I was more interested, in fact, in the adults. So this was what they looked like, so this was how they behaved. The sire was a contented suck of a thing, quite amenable to scritches and belly rubs. So far, so good.

Two weeks later we returned, this time bringing our friend and her son, our “almost son”, who lives with us part of each week while his flight attendant mum walks the aisles to England and back. The breeders were able to assess us as a family unit, to better choose the right dog for us. They could see how mild-mannered our friend is, and how gentle her 10-year-old. I was sitting on the floor when one puppy, a sable with a white spot on his nape, crawled into my lap and fell asleep. Three weeks later, he was ours.

We wanted a Cardi who wasn’t too headstrong, one who was more laidback than feisty, more sweet than sassy. The breeders knew that, and chose the little sable accordingly. He did not look sick, just quiet and good-natured.

We brought him home in mid-November, when he was nine weeks old. A few days later he started puppy preschool. I was a little disappointed that he kept getting sleepy and refusing the motivational treats before the 45 minutes were up, but he was the youngest and smallest in his class. Also, around this time, I phoned the breeder to say that poggles didn’t seem to have much of an appetite. She said not to worry, dogs are simple: If a dog doesn’t eat, he isn’t hungry. Fair enough.

Early in the new year, Puppy started tossing his food. Probably normal, I thought; sometimes young children toss their cookies because of a still-wimpy epiglotis.

Then Puppy started tossing his training treats. Then Puppy started tossing his water. Now I was getting frightened. I reported it to the vet twice during the month of February. She wanted to know whether it was vomit or regurgitation? Regurgitation, I replied. His drinking water would simply fall out almost immediately, but his kibble might reappear anytime after eating.

That was when my partner and I first heard about megaesophagus. The vet suggested a barium x-ray, we said sure, and at exactly six months of age our puppy was diagnosed.

We discussed the x-ray with the youngest vet in the clinic. He was almost as upset as we were; this was his first experience with megaesophagus, and he said the older vet had seen only three cases in 25 years of practice.

The young vet pulled no punches.  Our pup could possibly be dead in a few months. Besides not getting enough nutrition, besides the risk of dehydration, there was the possibility of aspiration. This means that poggles might regurgitate during his sleep, get the food up his pharynx and into his lungs, and contract pneumonia, or simply suffocate if he were already weak enough.

Wow.

I wasn’t ready to watch a puppy die. Really, I wasn’t. I called the breeder to discuss bringing him back. She was familiar with the disease; she had had an Irish Wolfhound with megaesophagus once, but had never seen it in any Cardigan. But she assured me of two things: one, that megaesophagus can often be managed, with the dog living a full life; and two, that we had adopted this puppy in good faith, and that she would reserve us another puppy for free whenever we asked, no matter whether this one lived twelve more days or twelve more years. See if you can’t hold out a little longer, she said. So we held out.

As you’ll have noticed if you’ve looked at my earlier blog entries, text and photos, we now have one sleek, happy, muscled mite on our hands. We also have a much lower paper towel budget. Has poggles outgrown his megaesophagus? Well, he’s certainly outgrown the misery of it. While he still has the condition, it’s much less intrusive than it was a year ago. Tomorrow I’ll write about our experience in managing the malady.

Corgi responsible for neighbourhood hiring

It looks even more sinister in its British spelling: megaoesophagus. Although a hyphen would have rendered Mr. Rogers’s elocution lessons much simpler — “Can you say ‘mega-esophagus’?” — it is, with or without the o, all one, long, ominous string of syllables.

Our Cardi has it.

In lay terms, megaesophagus is a condition wherein the dog has no swallowing muscles. Think of a tube sock that has seen too many wash cycles: no elasticity, unable to do its job.

When we first got our pup, I assumed that his regurgitation of kibble, treats, and water was something he would outgrow. It grew worse. By the time our vet x-rayed him and diagnosed his condition, she had had at least two reports of the puppy’s spit-ups, and the poor little dog was looking pinched around the face.

Because I haven’t had a dog since I was a kid (read: my mother cared for a dog while I was growing up), and my partner has had even less experience of the Fido lifestyle, we decided to get a purebred, so that we would know more or less what to expect from our new pet. We certainly didn’t expect rare diseases.

The folks at the local petstore got to know us. We were in there at least once a week, getting a new toy or experimenting with food and treats, looking for a car-ride harness or trying out roadsalt preventive products. My dog’s uncommon breed and even less common health problem made for immediate conversation every time we went in. I liked that place.

So when a sign went in the window asking for part-time help, I jumped at the chance and put in my resume. That was last July. Almost immediately — okay, last week — the manager called. He said the other employees thought I was the right choice, and could I come in for a talk? I could. I’m to have 10 or 12 hours a week, relieving the other employees who really haven’t had any wiggle room for too long now.

The store doesn’t sell pets, just products, and so it smells like alfalfa. The customers are local residents, some of whom I recognized during my first training shift on Tuesday. I already know and like my co-workers. And it’s part-time, which is all I want. It’s perfect, it’s ideal, and it’s because of the grace of dog that I’m working there.

Scoters, Scaups, and Scandal

Yesterday we went to the mouth of the river again. A bitter wind was up, so we stayed for only an hour this time. However, I managed to see my first-ever Scoter; this model is called a White-winged Scoter, even though the wings are mostly black. My partner got some good photos of it — oh look, here’s one now!

We had good views of other waterfowl as well: Scaups (Greaters, I think), Longtail Ducks (formerly known as “Oldsquaws”), Black Ducks, Mallards, Buffleheads, and Red-breasted Mergansers, as well as the ubiquitous Canada Geese and Mute Swans.

I also saw a stick floating in the bay — against the current. Hmm. Chestnut fur and a pair of eyes, that’s some stick all right! Still not sure which little gaffer I was viewing, a mink or a weasel or what. I was surprised that any mammal that small would be hanging out so close to the edge of Lake Ontario. A few minutes after I spied the furry Gollum thing, our Cardi started rolling luxuriously by a little hole in the snow; maybe he was dabbing a bit of mustelid cologne behind his shoulderblades.

We were home by 2 pm. At 5 pm I took the doggie with me for walkies over to feed the neighbours’ cats.

It’s important to be discreet when petsitting, so as not to trumpet the fact that the owners are away. But yesterday’s scenario might be entitled, “Discretion is the better part of vacuity.” Puppy and I popped into the house, called hello up to the caninophobic cats hiding on the third floor, threw some kibble in their dishes, and left.

Leaving is more complicated than — well — just leaving. You hit the remote to turn on the alarm, which starts the 60-second countdown. Then you open the door, pop the doorknob in to lock it, get yourself outside, close the door, and lock the other lock with a key. With this training, I’m ready to join a SWAT operation. Since my doggie is very well-behaved, I dropped his leash while performing the manouevers.

Turning away from the door, I found myself face-to-face with a smiling young couple and the parents of one of them. The young wife said they had just bought the house next door, and was I Robert’s wife? My eyes went blank; my jaw dropped; I replied: “Uhh… almost?”

Then, realizing that “almost Robert’s wife” may be construed in various ways, I stage-whispered that I was the catsitter, and didn’t want the whole street to know that the couple was away. Then the smiling new neighbours’ parents said, “Your dog’s over there.”

During the kerfuffle, my well-trained dog had decided to visit a Labrador Retriever across the street. When I left that yard, a woman and her young son were just exiting their home, and my friendly Cardi jumped up on her in muddy greeting.

Next time, I should just wear a neon-pink sandwich board with “Ace Petsitting” emblazoned on it.

Merganser Morning

Last Sunday we went to the mouth of the river. For three hours we tramped around in the decaying snow, each of us using her or his favourite instrument: binoculars for me, camera for my partner, nose for our dog.

Later on, we each processed our experiences in our own way. I gushed to my watercolour teacher, a fellow birder, about having seen all three species of merganser in one morning. My partner uploaded some photos to her Flickr site. And our Cardi curled up in the papasan to dream rich dreams of dried grass, goose droppings, foxes, voles, and muskrats.

Cardigan may help alleviate symptoms of menopause

My brother and his wife live on a hundred acres of scrubland with four or five dogs. One night, my partner and I stayed over, sharing the pullout couch with a midsized Jack Russell cross. Since we were in fact sleeping in the doggie’s bed, she naturally stayed the night.

I didn’t toss and turn — there wasn’t enough room — but I did awake several times. Not once, however, did I have a hot flash. I found this lack of torment nothing short of miraculous, and attributed it to the serene snoring of our canine companion. I had heard that pets can lower blood pressure; maybe they can ease menopause symptoms as well, I reasoned.

Turns out my assumption was a false one, but the thought of getting a dog of our own was a graspable straw that took the fancy of both my partner and me. We discussed it with friends, researched the various breeds, and on Remembrance Day 2006 we drove out 60 miles to pick up our little Cardigan Welsh Corgi pup.

I still get hot flashes. They’re lovely things, filling me with self-loathing and shame, simply because their heat mimics the physiological symptoms that occurred in childhood whenever I was embarrassed or a parent scolded me. They will end someday, and I would rather have them than breast cancer (a possible side effect of HRT meds).

Meanwhile, my dog helps alleviate my feelings of shame and worthlessness. Dogs are much more childlike than cats. I fill my cat’s kibble dish twice a week, scoop the litterbox about as often, occasionally leave him for a long weekend, and he’s fine. But my little Cardi needs more of my help. He can’t use a litterbox, and he doesn’t sporadically nibble on kibble the way cats do, needing instead two prepared meals daily. My dog gets me outside of myself.

In fact, my dog gets me outside, at least three times a day: morning potty, and two half-hour-plus play sessions (my partner oversees the before-bedtime potty). This season has been the snowiest we’ve had in ten years; I never would have gotten all this daily exercise if I didn’t have my sturdy little Cardi. And I never would have been forced to live winter the way I have this year, studying the changes in the snow, and spying the local kestrels and the wintering red-tailed hawks soaring over the high-rises.

I also wouldn’t have met so many other people. It’s a real sanity saver for me, an introvert, to have made so many acquaintances. Just when I’m feeling blue, one neighbour or another is waving hello and tacitly affirming my right to share the planet. Dog parents are like any other parents, happy to meet and chat while their little ones play together. We compare notes, share a laugh, and delight in the special friendships that develop between our own dog and that of our neighbour.

Come to think of it, two of my dog’s favourite playmates are Jack Russells. Poetic justice?