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I won't have any blog posts for the rest of this week because a) I am fresh out of material at the moment and b) I will be on the road to Burlington tomorrow and Friday to take Darla to the ophthalmologist. Yes, she is finally having her cataract surgery to restore her vision! So I will have an update on her posted for Monday. See you then!
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Alayne got this shot of Widget late last week, during the worst of the heat wave. Yes, like the previous post with Aurora, the fan was definitely on but the camera managed to "freeze" the blade. Just before Alayne picked up the camera, Widget's ears were flying out further, but then she dropped her head a bit and lost the lift. Widget's view is that while sticking your entire body immediately in front of the fan is okay, central air conditioning would be a lot better. (Not going to happen, Widge.)
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I took this photo yesterday afternoon of Aurora cooling off upside down in her basket bed in front of the fan. The fan was indeed on, it's just that this digital SLR camera shoots at such high speed it makes the fan blades look like they're not moving. Believe me, as hot as yesterday was, that fan was going nonstop — and a certain one-eyed girl was enjoying the breeze! Aurora's comfort was in stark contrast to that of her two humans, who were subsequently outside in the 90° (32° C) heat hilling up potato plants in the field. Oh, well. Someone has to be comfortable, eh?
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Widget is the last to eat dinner, always dining alone in the living room. She likes it that way. While she's eating, we're finishing putting the rest of the dogs up for the night. Then, after she's done, Widget heads out into the front yard on these summer evenings, wanders a bit, and ends up camping out at the base of the spruce tree.
We call this her "taking of the night airs," because she loves to sit there, nose up, sniffing around to see what's in the air. Widget knows all the other dogs are inside and she has the yard to herself, which she prefers. If Alayne and I are in good shape on evening chores, we may sit on the front porch for a while, watching the Widge enjoying the fresh air. We imagine that for a blind dog like her, the air is an even more important source of "information" than it is for a sighted dog.
Left to her own devices, on many evenings she'll stay out there long after it gets dark. For Widget, who's been sleeping all the day, the night is still young and the scents so promising. For her personal attendants, who've been working all day, it's time for bed. So one of her attendants will have to get a flashlight to go look for her under the tree. With a "Sorry to interrupt, Widge," we scoop her up and bring her back to the house.
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This one belongs in the ever-expanding "odd and awkward sleeping positions" file. That's Dexter, who has recently been sleeping more often like this with his head turned completely backwards. We can't figure out how that could possibly be comfortable, or how he doesn't wake up with his neck stiff as a board, but sleep like this he does. As we say around here when seeing these sorts of inexplicable things, "If it works for them, it works for them." So far we haven't seen anyone else duplicate this particular position. Under the blanket next to Dexter is Wilbur the Chihuahua, who prefers more conventional sleeping positions.
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When I took Darla in for her eye exam a few weeks ago, I also took Zach for his exam. We knew he was completely blind when he arrived, and based on our own cursory exam and our long experience in observing blind dogs, I didn't think there was much chance of restoring his vision. That turned out to be the case.
In the photo above, our relief ophthalmologist, Dr. Vivian Jamieson, is using the slit lamp while vet tech Patty holds Zach. Dr. Jamieson concluded that Zach had gone blind from Sudden Acquired Retinal Degeneration Syndrome, or SARDS. In her write-up on her findings, she wrote: "Unfortunately this is a a permanent retinal condition with no treatment to reverse the blindness. Despite multiple research projects on this condition, our profession has come up with more questions than answers to this condition and we still do not know what the underlying cause is."
The good news is that his eyes are comfortable and, barring the development of any other disease, should stay that way. He is one happy boy who has adjusted well to blindness. What he hasn't adjusted to his new diet, however, and he continues to question why he needs to be on one. Hmm.
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We're going to take a blog break this week in light of the holiday. We hope all of you have a wonderful Independence Day on July 4th, and to our friends up north, Happy Canada Day today!
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First, Alayne and I wanted to thank everyone for their heartfelt condolences about dear Bentley. It was a crushing loss, and one we are struggling to deal with, but we are so grateful for the outpouring of emotional support and kind words over the past few days.
For every tragic outcome like Bentley's, something caught my eye this morning that reminded me of all the other very happy ones. When I walked into the dog room to begin letting them out, I looked over at Bentley's empty crate and noticed, in a whole new way, what was written on it: "Charlie" across the front and "blind dog" along the sides. Well, this was the crate that a blind Beagle named Charlie arrived in several years ago, and we went on to restore his vision and then see him happily adopted by a wonderful family in Washington state. Thinking of Charlie was a very nice counterpoint this morning to the sadness I felt at not seeing a little Yorkie inside the crate.On a lighter note and a totally different subject, I've written before about this lush, wet New Hampshire climate (well, at least when there's not snow on the ground!), and back in late June 2010 I posted a photo of our weather station showing a 98% humidity reading. We've seen a lot of 98's and 99's since then, but until this morning, never 100% humidity:
After I started taking the first photos I realized the time was off — it said 4:03 pm — so I reset it for the current time. I didn't realize the date was off by one day, too, until I uploaded the photos … so it's showing yesterday's date but it really was this morning! The photo at the top of this post was the foggy view across the front yard, and here's a view to the west across the dog wing and solarium:
It wasn't even raining. Now that's damp!
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For some reason he hadn't been on the blog very much, and I don't know why. Bentley was a star, and I just never seemed to have the camera ready when he was giving us another wonderful moment. He was one of the sweetest, funniest, most affectionate little dogs we've ever had the privilege to know and love. And then, tragically, he was gone.
He died suddenly on Saturday, just six months after coming to us, and only three months after we were able to restore his vision.
Bentley was always the first one I would take out of a crate every morning, and whenever I would open the door to the dog room, he would be bouncing up and down in his crate, looking at me, jumping with excitement. I'd pull him out and set him down on the floor. Then he would dance a quick jig, run in circles across the floor, come back and jump up on me, then twirl and take off again in circles. It was just how he celebrated each new day. Alayne called him "our own little Fred Astaire."
So on Saturday morning when I opened the door, I instantly knew something was dreadfully wrong. He wasn't standing in his crate, waiting for me, bouncing up and down. He was laying on his side. Even before I got to his crate, I yelled down the hall to Alayne, "Something's wrong with Bentley!"
I reached in to pick him up, and there was no resistance. His body was limp. There was black diarrhea and red blood in the back of his crate. Bentley was breathing, and he'd blink, but that was the only sign of life in him.
In a couple of minutes I was in the van and rushing him to the emergency veterinary clinic in Littleton. Alayne had already called to let them know we were on the way.On the road I called our internal medicine specialist in Burlington, Dr. Tanya Donovan, who was working that day in her clinic. She had just treated Bentley the previous week for the final stage of his heartworm treatment. I told her what had happened, and that he had been his usual happy, buoyant self the night before. I asked if there could be some connection to the heartworm treatment, but complications usually manifest themselves in respiratory issues and what we were seeing just didn't mesh.
Tanya told me to have the emergency vet call her and she would help in any way she could. Ideally I would have taken Bentley to Burlington, because Tanya's clinic is an emergency hospital as well, but that was two hours away and I didn't think he could make it that far without medical intervention.
At the Littleton clinic, I was just walking through the door with Bentley in a crate when the doctor, Dr. Christine Nau, rushed up and whisked us to a treatment station. Over the next eight hours she tried valiantly to save Bentley's life. Here's a photo I took with my phone shortly after getting there:
Her initial assessment was HGE, or hemorrhagic gastroenteritis, which we had experienced before with Widget. But his blood panel came back with his ALT, a key liver value, literally off the chart and unreadable. They ran another screen just to isolate the ALT, and it came back at 2,052 — when the high end of normal was only 100. That was shocking, and couldn't be explained by simply HGE.
She had a hunch there was a blood problem, and then ran a more specialized test to determine his clotting factors, called a "coag" test. This came back also as off the charts and unreadable. There was simply an ">" at the end of the bar under "High." Now I knew Bentley was in real trouble.
During this entire time Dr. Nau and Tanya were in frequent contact. Dr. Nau told me that Bentley's case was exactly the kind where it really helps to have an internal medicine specialist involved to make sense of complex and sometimes confusing symptoms, so she was delighted to have Tanya to consult with throughout the day. And after one of the early calls, Tanya came back on the line to tell me, "You're in very good hands with Dr. Nau." I knew it at that point.
The coag test results suggested this might be disseminated intravascular coagulation, or DIC:
Disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) is a rare, life-threatening condition that prevents a person's blood from clotting normally. It may cause excessive clotting (thrombosis) or bleeding (hemorrhage) throughout the body and lead to shock, organ failure, and death.
In DIC, the body's natural ability to regulate blood clotting does not function properly. This causes the blood's clotting cells (platelets) to clump together and clog small blood vessels throughout the body. This excessive clotting damages organs, destroys blood cells, and depletes the supply of platelets and other clotting factors so that the blood is no longer able to clot normally. This often causes widespread bleeding, both internally and externally.
A simpler explanation for his symptoms would have been rat poison, but we don't have any here and never have, so that couldn't have been the cause.
Dr. Nau gave him a plasma transfusion over the course of the next four hours. Our plan was to get him stable and then transfer him to Tanya's clinic late Saturday, where she could take over his treatment. But when I returned later that afternoon to pick him up and head to Burlington, I watched him in the medical cage and could tell there wasn't any real improvement. He was breathing hard, which was a change that had occurred in the previous half-hour. He had continued to ooze bloody gunk from his rear end throughout the day, which suggested to Tanya and Dr. Nau that his intestines were sloughing off the lining — presumably because clots were choking off the blood supply to his GI tract.Dr. Nau was concerned about whether he was really stable enough to make the trip, and I had to agree. We called Tanya, who concurred and recommended leaving him there for the rest of the night and then re-assess in the morning.
We ran his coag test again, after the plasma transfusion, and the readings had improved — still far too high, but it gave us a little hope. But in the next thirty minutes, his heart stopped … then restarted after a couple of seconds. His breathing continued to be labored and rapid, an indication that his lungs might be also compromised by clots now.
At this stage Bentley was in the oxygen cage. Suddenly he tried to sit up, went rigid, and cried out. Then he sank back down.
That's when Dr. Nau and I decided it was time to let him go. In tears, I called Alayne to tell her what we needed to do. She said, crying, "Just tell him I love him so much." After getting off the phone, I reached out to stroke him and said in a quavering voice, "Honey, your mommy loves you so much."
I was bending over him, sobbing, with my face resting on his body, when he slipped away. I couldn't believe he was gone. We'd only had him in our lives for six months, but it felt like ten years. And he was just getting his new start in life. It ended far too soon.
On Sunday morning there was no bright-eyed boy dancing his jig across the floor. The room, full of dogs, felt empty. Because one adorable little fellow was missing.
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Well, he could pass for one of the characters from the bar scene in Star Wars, but this is blind Zach after his surgery to remove the large growth on his head.
Our board-certified surgeon, Dr. Josie Mallinckrodt, did the surgery last week in Burlington on the day Darla was having her ophthalmology and internal medicine appointments. (Bentley was also there for the second phase of his heartworm treatment, and Wilbur was there for more blood pressure monitoring — so a full day all the way around!)
I particularly liked the close-cropped head shave that goes right up to the long white fluffy ears. Stylish!
Josie has sent a biopsy to the pathologist and we should have the results this week. Meanwhile, Zach is happy to show off his new look for summer.
Rolling Dog Farm Blog 