Rolling Dog Farm Blog

Widget’s prosthetic eye was not looking good again … she was squinting and the eye seemed red and inflamed once more … so Alayne drove her to Helena this afternoon to let our vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, check her out.  Well, we could have called today’s 140-mile round-trip run the "Hypochondriac Express," because Brenda assured us Widget’s eye is actually still fine.  She’s pleased with how it’s healing and the prognosis remains good.

Rather than worry ourselves sick, we probably should have taken our cue from Widget herself.  Here’s a photo of Widget snoozing away just before we rousted her from her slumber for the road trip today. 

As a result of today’s evaluation, though, Widget will need to wear the cone on her head for at least another week.  Bummer!  Tomorrow was supposed to be ‘Cone Independence Day,’ when the darned thing finally came off.

To see the original post on her eye surgery, click here.

I had to take dear old Keisha, our 18-year old three-legged girl, in to the vet today to be euthanized.  Keisha had been going downhill for months, losing weight, becoming incontinent, and finding it increasingly difficult to maneuver on her one rear leg … which had hip dysplasia, making it even harder.  This photo is of Keisha soon after she arrived at the ranch from
Missoula Animal Control, when she was already a grand 16 years of age.

Yet she had her good days, when she’d be bright and alert and engaged, and she’d seem like her old self.  But the bad days began outnumbering the good ones.  Her kidneys were starting to fail, and she began having light tremors … not all the time, but frequently.  The tremors became more common in recent days.  We could tell her circulation was slowing down because her feet weren’t as warm as they should be.

Last Friday she seemed really down, but Friday night she had perked up again … but that was the last time she brightened.  We brought her over to the main house this weekend to be with us and keep an eye on her.  Yet it was clear the time had come.   

So I bundled Keisha into the truck and drove into Missoula this afternoon to see Dr. Bostwick.  I had asked Dave if he would euthanize her for us.  I laid Keisha on the table and made all over her.  Our new employee, Kathryn, had described Keisha as a ‘proud old lady,’ and that captured her perfectly.  She was dignified and wanted to be treated that way, too.  She didn’t like to have her feet or her face touched, but she did like to kiss.  As I was petting her while she lay on the table, she lifted her head up and licked me twice on the face.  That broke my heart.  A couple of minutes later she was gone. 

You can read this remarkable girl’s story here.

Three of our volunteers from Helena came out to the ranch for a full day’s worth of work.  That’s Heather H. on the left, LuAnn W., and LuAnn’s sister Laura W.  I took the photo just before they left to head home to Helena this afternoon.  Heather cleaned stalls in Lena’s Barn, LuAnn cleaned the cat house and scooped poop, and Laura filled stock tanks and groomed horses.  Then Heather cleaned more stalls in Beauty’s Barn while Laura drove the tractor back and forth to the compost pile with the stall "stuff."  (I think Heather got the real work-out today!)  Thank you, ladies!

Looking over their shoulders are two of our blind horses, Hawk on the left and his best friend, Rocky.  They did absolutely no work today, just like every day.  They live to be fed, watered, groomed and fussed over.  Work is for humans.

After taking the photo above, we noticed that Heather and Laura and I were wearing nearly identical matching outfits, featuring our can’t-do-without Carhartt clothing.  So here’s a photo LuAnn took of the three of us as ‘Carhartt models.’

(Click on photos for larger image.)

Yesterday I talked with the vet from Great Falls who had treated Bailey two years ago.  He said Bailey had both a slipped disk and a ruptured disk, and although he did the surgery, Bailey did not respond as well as the vet had hoped.  (I think he said there’s a 75% success rate for this type of surgery.)  He agreed with our veterinary surgeon in Spokane, Dr. Lawrence, that more surgery would not be an option at this point.  (See first post on Bailey here, and last week’s posts below.)

It turned out that this vet was asked by the local authorities to assess the conditions at the animal hoarder’s place a few months ago.  When he and his vet tech arrived at the scene, they found tiny Bailey with his crippled legs in an outdoor pen with 15 other dogs!  The vet said Bailey looked like he had given up.  He said, "You could see it in his eyes.  There was no hope.  He just wanted to die."  The other dogs were running over him, falling on him, and he was cowering in a corner trying to protect himself. 

The vet recognized Bailey as one of his former patients, and they scooped him up on the spot and took him back to the clinic. That was the first the vet knew his client had abandoned this little dog and handed him over to an animal hoarder.

Well, Bailey’s life has finally turned around, and we have fallen completely in love with this tyke.  I had written in an earlier post that he enjoyed playing with toys, and someone posted a comment asking for a photo.  Here’s one I took yesterday.  He has a "thing" about chewing on soft toys for a while and then burying his head in them … he lays there motionless, as if he’s sleeping … but in fact it’s a ploy.  He’s actually looking around while his head is pointed down. 

You can see his eyes are wide open and he’s looking over in our direction.  He is a real character, with lots of spunk and personality.  I think he is just reveling in his new life … it’s almost like he can’t believe his luck.  We are so glad he’s here.

(Click on photo for larger image.)

I had to take my cat Willis to the emergency clinic in Missoula last night to be euthanized.  He had been wasting away for months, battling not just lymphoma but also high blood pressure, heart problems, and a thyroid issue.  Here’s Willis in this photo I took a few weeks ago, when he was having his last check-up with our internist, Dr. Dave Bostwick.  Despite being on blood pressure medication then, Willis maxed out the blood pressure test that day and sent the meter off the scale.  (We doubled his dose of Norvasc!)

Every day we made up a drug "cocktail" for him with all his medications.  Despite looking awful and weighing only 6 pounds (down from his once robust 15 pounds), he still eagerly greeted us at the door to the cat house, he loved to eat, and he enjoyed getting petted.  He was a real purr machine, even when he didn’t look like he’d have the strength to purr. 

But over the course of the past two days Willis had begun losing his appetite, and then last night he did not come out for dinner.  He was holed up in a cat tree condo and didn’t want to venture out.  We finally coaxed him out, and I could tell the end was near:  His breathing sounded raspy and he stretched his neck out, the way animals do when they’re starting to have respiratory distress. 

I realized his long battle with cancer and his other afflictions was finally over, and I didn’t want him to suffer.  Alayne called the emergency clinic to say I was on the way, and I wrapped Willis in thick bedding and hopped in the truck for the hour-long trip to Missoula.

I’ve had Willis longer than any other animal now in our lives.  In fact, I had Willis before I even met Alayne, so this sweet old gray cat and I go back a long, long way.  It was a very sad night.

Widget’s new prosthetic eye (see original post here) started looking bad yesterday, and by today it was red and inflamed.  This morning Alayne and I took some digital photos of her eye and e-mailed them to Widget’s vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, in Helena for some ‘telemedicine’ consulting.  Based on the images (like this one), Brenda suspected a corneal ulcer and said we should bring her in.  So Alayne bundled Widget into the truck and headed down the road 70 miles east to Helena (and into a whiteout at the top of MacDonald Pass).

Brenda was right:  On exam she discovered that Widget did indeed have a superficial corneal ulcer.  Even though there is a prosthetic INSIDE the globe (or sclera) of the eye, the cornea is still there … it helps hold the prosthetic in place. 

Fortunately it was not serious and we caught it early.  The prosthetic continues to look good and there’s no sign yet that Widget’s body is preparing to reject it.  Brenda provided Alayne with new medications and a treatment plan.  Thus equipped, Alayne and Widget reversed course and headed west back to Ovando.  (We could really use an all-weather helicopter on days like this.)

(Click on photo for larger image.)

I talked with Dr. Howard Lawrence, our board-certified veterinary surgeon in Spokane, today about Bailey and what Dr. Bostwick found during his exam yesterday.  Dr. Lawrence said that Bailey is most likely NOT a candidate for surgery because the injury is old.  He said they generally don’t like operating on the spine if an injury is more than a couple of months old because it’s usually too late at that point, and there’s a risk of making things worse rather than better.  That would be particularly true in Bailey’s case since he can still walk on his own.  Add to this the fact that Bailey doesn’t seem to be in any pain, and Dr. Lawrence said there would be far more downside than upside in trying to operate.  However, he said he would still be glad to examine Bailey for us.

Dr. Lawrence said spinal cases respond best to immediate treatment, and the older the injury, the less they as surgeons can help.  Bailey’s injury is old enough that he has lost muscle mass in his back and he’s atrophied along his lower spine, suggesting the slipped disk occurred a long time ago.  (This is why his lower spine is so sharp and bony … the surrounding muscle and tissue have atrophied away.)

Literally 10 minutes after I got off the phone with Dr. Lawrence, I received an e-mail from a lady in Great Falls who read our blog posting on Bailey’s medical exam yesterday.  Gloria L. knew some of Bailey’s history, and said Bailey had back surgery about two years ago, but his then-owner did not do the follow-up therapy and this little guy’s problem re-developed.  Not wanting to care for a dog with this issue, the owner gave Bailey to Gloria, but took Bailey back after two weeks because Gloria was going to have him neutered.  The owner then turned around and gave Bailey to the animal hoarder who was finally convicted of animal cruelty two weeks ago.  (Can you imagine?)

Gloria gave me the name of the vet in Great Falls who did the surgery, and I have a call in to him to find out more.  Hopefully I’ll be able to give a complete picture now to Dr. Lawrence.  It sounds like it won’t change the assessment, but at least we’ll know the full story.  (Thank you, Gloria!)

Meanwhile, here are photos I took of Bailey in my office this afternoon.  The first one is his "I’m Sheik Bailey" routine, pretending to be a Saudi royal prince.  You can see old Pappy looking on from the other dog bed.  (Pappy’s been wondering, "Where do they get all these short-legs from?)

Then, minutes later, the dog completely disappears under the towel.  It starts moving around on the bed as if it were, um, Dachshund-powered.  There really IS a dog inside there.

Pappy is not impressed by the disappearing-Dachshund act.  He’s seen it before.  Nothin’ to it.

(Click on photos for larger image.)

While I was in Missoula yesterday running from vet clinic to vet clinic, I also stocked up on our usual supplies — 700 lbs of equine senior grain and 20 bales of wood shavings.  (Yes, and a few groceries for the two-footed residents here.)  Here’s a photo of Kathryn starting to unload the truck and distribute the supplies between Lena’s Barn and Beauty’s Barn this morning.  What you see on the tractor are the bales of wood shavings we use for stall bedding.  (Beth, our other employee, has been enjoying a well-earned vacation back home in New Jersey this week.)

(Click on photo for larger image.)

This afternoon I was running back and forth between vets, with Chance and George at Bill Brown’s clinic for chemotherapy (see post below) and little Bailey at Dave Bostwick’s clinic for a complete exam.  We wanted to know why Bailey’s rear legs don’t work right and why his back seems out of whack. 

We also asked Dave to ultrasound his organs, do an echocardiogram of his heart, and run a full blood panel.  (Our usual ‘oil/lube/filter’ for the old ones.)  We don’t have the blood work back yet, but his organs and heart generally looked pretty good.  His bladder has thickened walls, so Dave said we should treat it as a ‘presumptive’ urinary tract infection and start him on antibiotics.

In the photo Dave is examining Bailey’s spine and back.  Dave’s hands-on exam combined with X-rays told us what the problem is:  Bailey has a ‘transverse thoracic-lumbar myelopathy,’ which means his nerve signals are interrupted somewhere between the 3rd thoracic vertebrae and the 3rd lumbar vertebrae.  In other words, it’s a slipped disk.  Dave thinks he could tell from the X-ray which disk is causing the problem, but the only way to know for sure is a myelogram. 

The good news is that surgery IS a possible option, and would be done by our veterinary surgeons in Spokane at Veterinary Surgical Specialists, Dr. Howard Lawrence or Dr. Joe Harari.  We will call them tomorrow to discuss Bailey’s case.  However, Dave did caution me that if Bailey has lived like this for many years, we may not be able to correct it surgically.

I asked Dave if he thought Bailey was in pain.  He said Bailey didn’t seem to act like it, which is what Alayne and I thought, too.  Bailey likes playing with toys, gets very animated about food, and loves to  wrap himself in bedding so he looks like a Saudi prince.  He enjoys being picked up and held, and has never once cried out or yiked.  One explanation, Dave said, is that after several years without treatment, the nerves in the problem area can start becoming numb (a blessed relief, when you think about it).

So at this point we really won’t know much more till we get him to Spokane.  We’ll keep you posted!

(Click on photo for larger image.)

I took blind Chance and our old mule, Lonesome George, in to Dr. Bill Brown’s clinic in Missoula today so they could have their second round of chemotherapy.  Both equines have lymphoma, and Bill recently learned about a new treatment protocol for this cancer from Ohio State University’s School of Veterinary Medicine.  There are two drugs involved, and each week we alternate between them.  The second drug, cytoxan, needs to be administered intravenously, which is why we were at Bill’s clinic.

In the first photo you can see the IV bags hanging from the horse stock, with the tubes running to the catheters in each animal’s neck.  Chance was really bored by this whole exercise, and spent most of his time in the stock yawning, rubbing his head on the post, trying to untie George, and … failing that … trying to untie the string holding the IV bags up.  If you click on the second photo to view the larger image, you can see Chance has the string in his mouth and he’s pulling on it for all it’s worth.

Now, bear in the mind that he’s blind, he has no eyes in his head, and he has lymphoma as well.  Yet he’s acting like any other horse.  That’s what we love about these guys … they don’t ever feel sorry for themselves, they just like to enjoy life, and that means being a horsey goofball at times.

(Click on photos for larger image.)