Rolling Dog Farm Blog

I drove back to our vet clinic in Helena today to pick up some animals we'd left there last week, as well as to take blind Helen for her latest chemotherapy treatment.  One of the dogs who came home was blind Samantha, who'd been to the clinic for a dental and to have a growth removed on her side.  The growth appears to be benign, fortunately.

When the vet tech was bringing Samantha through the surgery suite in the back of the clinic, Sam heard my voice and just about jumped out of her skin with excitement.  She whirled and twirled and jumped up and down, pulling the vet tech with her as she made her way towards me.  Her eyes lit up and then came that famous smile of hers.  I don't think I'd ever seen her as happy.  But then I realized this was what happened before with blind Madison, too, and others who have been left at the vet clinic for the first time since coming here:  they wonder if they'd been abandoned again.  And hearing our voice is the first indication they get that they're going home. 

As you can see from the photo above, Sam was just as excited when we got back to the ranch.  That's her greeting Alayne after getting out of the truck.  For an older girl, she's still pretty spry!  (Sam, that is, not Alayne.  Though Alayne is pretty spry herself.  As for her age, well, I'm not saying a thing.)

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Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for us every
day in The Animal Rescue
Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge. 
Thanks
to your votes, we came in third nationwide and won $3,000 for the
animals in the previous contest.  Now we have a shot at No. 1 and the
$20,000 grand prize!  Enter
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It's understandable if you don't recognize this as blind Gabe, and no, he's not undergoing sensory deprivation either!  He has had a rough go of it since coming home from three weeks of radiation therapy for his nasal tumor at WSU.  The side-effects of the radiation caused the skin around his eyes and the top of his snout to become inflamed, bleed, and eventually peel off; this itched like crazy, too, but of course that's why he had to wear a cone, because scratching at the skin eruptions would only make them much worse.  His mouth developed oral ulcers, too, and infection developed.  So he's been on a long course of eye ointments, antibiotics and pain medications.  All of this the oncologist at WSU had prepared us for.  (We did not experience these side-effects from blind Callie's brain tumor radiation treatment because of where the radiation field was located.)

Fortunately, we are through the worst of it now, and though he has lots of bare skin around his eyes and his nose, his skin has stopped new rounds of blistering.  One thing he still loves is a warm, wet compress over his eyes and nose; it's soothing and clearly feels so good he'll just sit there with it draped over his face like this.  I took the photo of Gabe enjoying his compress this morning.  He's wearing a soft cone that's padded and flexible.  He's just disappointed it didn't come in camouflage.

—

Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for us every
day in The Animal Rescue
Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge. 
Thanks
to your votes, we came in third nationwide and won $3,000 for the
animals in the previous contest.  Now we have a shot at No. 1 and the
$20,000 grand prize!  Enter
"Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana,
and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Please ask
your family and friends to vote, too.  Thank you!

Well, I had tried really hard not to get my hopes up over this, but after we saw blind Madison's pupils respond to light during her eye exam last week, it was impossible not to keep thinking about what it would mean to give Madison the gift of sight, too.  So I was kind of a nervous wreck this morning when I drove her to Helena for her electroretinogram, or ERG, which would determine how much retinal function she had.  

After getting Madison sedated, the probes inserted, and the ERG machine initialized, our vet Dr. Brenda Culver picked up the yellow device that shines the bright light into the eye.  As I waited for the first pulse of light to flash in Madison's left eye, I held my breath and looked at the monitor screen.  A graph would appear almost instantly, and I knew what to look for.

I am not too proud to admit that I fought back tears when I saw the line appear on left side of the graph and begin to move sideways.  Madison was flat-lining.  She had no retinal function in that eye.

Brenda said, "Wait, don't react yet.  I want to repeat it."

But it was still the same result.  It was the same for her right eye, too.

She would never see again.

While Madison recovered from the anesthesia, I went out to the truck and called Alayne with the news.  Yes, by this time I was in tears.  With Charlie's experience at regaining vision so fresh in our minds, we wanted so desperately to do the same thing for Madison.  Intellectually I knew we only had a 50/50 chance, but emotionally we were 100% invested in a positive outcome.

I asked Brenda how we could have a pupillary light reflex — which indicates the retina is detecting some light — but have the ERG completely flat-lining.  The answer is a complicated one, having to do with how the retina itself works, but it comes down to degree of retinal function.  And Madison just didn't have enough to matter.

We had the opposite situation many years ago when we lived in Seattle.  Our dog Goldie was having some eye issues, and we took her to a veterinary ophthalmologist there for an exam.  Goldie flat-lined on her ERG, and yet she could still clearly see at that point.  The ophthalmologist marveled at this result, and told us that it just showed how much we still don't understand about how the brain and body can "re-wire" itself to cope.  She said at the time, "The ERG is telling us one thing, the dog is telling us something else."  It took a couple of years for Goldie's vision to catch up to the ERG results.

But today, sadly, there was no denying what Madison's ERG meant.  

Here's a close-up view of Madison after Brenda finished administering the ERG:

—

 
Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for us every
day in The Animal Rescue
Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge. 
Thanks
to your votes, we came in third nationwide and won $3,000 for the
animals in the previous contest.  Now we have a shot at No. 1 and the
$20,000 grand prize!  Enter
"Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana,
and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Please ask
your family and friends to vote, too.  Thank you!

Barely a month after his eye surgery to restore his vision, Charlie the once-blind Beagle from Georgia has now been adopted!  Julie and Richard S. from Olympia, Washington, were looking for a friend for their Beagle Hugo.  They had lost their other Beagle, Sampson, about a year ago to cancer, and wanted to find another companion for Hugo.  After several emails with us about Charlie, they came out to the ranch to meet our special boy — and they decided he was the one!  That's Charlie on the left and Hugo on the right.

Charlie has come a long way from the skinny, blind dog who was picked up as a stray in Cherokee County, Georgia, this past spring.  Now he's filled out, able to see, and has a loving new family to call his own.  We told Julie and Richard that Charlie, a dog from the Deep South, was also very excited to be leaving Montana just before winter arrived!

Thank you, Julie and Richard and Hugo for giving Charlie a wonderful home!

(Oh.  Almost forgot to mention:  The Dachshunds got together and did a bunch of little high-fives as soon as Charlie left.  They'd been getting worried that the Beagles were beginning to challenge their preeminent position at the ranch.  "One down, only two-and-a-half to go!," chirped Daisy.)

—

Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for us every
day in The Animal Rescue
Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge. 
Thanks
to your votes, we came in third nationwide and won $3,000 for the
animals in the previous contest.  Now we have a shot at No. 1 and the
$20,000 grand prize!  Enter
"Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana,
and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Please ask
your family and friends to vote, too.  Thank you!

When our primary care vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, was here last Monday to do the annual exams and vaccinations on everyone, she detected a heart murmur in Widget and recommended we get an echocardiogram done.  So when I went to Missoula last Friday to pick up blind Rosie from her colic surgery hospitalization, I took Widget along so our internal medicine specialist there, Dr. Dave Bostwick, could do the echo.  While we were at it, I asked him to do an abdominal ultrasound, chest X-rays, bloodwork and urinalysis.  In other words, we wanted to have all her systems checked out.  She's now at that age — about 8 years old — where we really start worrying that we'll miss something and not catch it in time.

In the photo above, Dave is doing the echocardiogram of her heart.  It turns out she has mitral valve regurgitation, but at this point it's not significant and doesn't require any medications.  It is something we'll need to have rechecked every 6 to 12 months, though.

Her chest X-rays looked fine.

On the abdominal ultrasound, however, Dave found some nonspecific spots on her kidneys that would have required the urinalysis any way to see if kidney function was becoming impaired.  The BUN and creatinine kidney values that are analyzed from the blood work don't typically show any changes until something like 75% of the kidney function is already lost … so by the time you see changes in the BUN and creatinine, you're already in trouble.  The urinalysis can give you an early look at kidney function.

This afternoon Dave called with the results, and we were relieved at the news:  All of her lab tests looked great!  Nice job, Widget!

—

Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for us every
day in The Animal Rescue
Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge. 
Thanks
to your votes, we came in third nationwide and won $3,000 for the
animals in the previous contest.  Now we have a shot at No. 1 and the
$20,000 grand prize!  Enter
"Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana,
and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Please ask
your family and friends to vote, too.  Thank you! 

As you can probably imagine, we are always doing laundry around here.  On any given day we do about five to seven loads, most of it the dog and cat bedding. That means there's always a stack or two (or three) of freshly laundered bedding, neatly folded and waiting to go back to one of the animal cottages.  Alas, one of Dexter's favorite activities involves knocking over those stacks and lying down on top of them.  It's as if he wants to claim all of the bedding as his own.  Being a Dachshund, that seems like a perfectly reasonable proposition.

If he can't knock the stack over because it's too high — say, on top of the dining table — he stands up on his hind feet, grabs the bottom piece of bedding with his teeth, and pulls the whole stack off.  It was a dining table heist that Alayne captured in the photo above.  Needless to say, this can get just a wee bit aggravating, walking into the house and finding the neat stacks of clean bedding knocked onto the floor with a Dachshund perched on top.  Although it's just a wee bit difficult to get mad at a face that looks like that.

—

Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for us every
day in The Animal Rescue
Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge. 
Thanks
to your votes, we came in third nationwide and won $3,000 for the
animals in the previous contest.  Now we have a shot at No. 1 and the
$20,000 grand prize!  Enter
"Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana,
and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Please ask
your family and friends to vote, too.  Thank you!

This is a wonderful update on blind Creighton, who came to us in the spring of 2008 from Mississippi and was adopted a few months later by Peggy and Matt M. of Olympia, Washington.  Peggy and Matt renamed him Emmitt Creighton III, and have sent us periodic updates on him and their other blind Labs.  (Emmitt became their third blind Lab!)  They just emailed us these photos, as well as a link to a video clip of Emmitt doing an amazing job of playing fetch.

Peggy and Matt wrote, "It is hard to believe that he has been with us for almost a year and a half now.  Needless to say, he is not the cute little puppy that he was when we brought him home a year ago last May.  He has developed into a handsome 75 pound athlete with a motor that is revved all the way up until it runs out of gas.

"In addition to his high energy level, he is curious, confident and smart.  One of his favorite games is fetch.  If you tell him to 'listen' he steps away and lifts his head in that blind dog way, slightly cocked with his nose in the air, on full alert.  He prefers tennis balls that have been cut open (there are always a few that are victims to being run over by the mower), we presume because they make more sound when they bounce and roll.  We can throw the ball 50 or so feet and he will bound after it, tracking the sound and pouncing once his nose has located the target.  He is amazingly effective.

"When he is not getting one of us to toss one of his 'customized' tennis balls, he is wrestling with Bobbie Lee or Danni, our other blind Labs, or chasing and harassing Alex, who can see and still thinks of himself as the 'big dog.'  It is fortunate that Emmitt can share his energy with a number of canine brothers and sisters, as he would doubtlessly exhaust any one of his more mature siblings."

Peggy and Matt also said they were "attaching a few pictures of his other favorite things … drinking from the faucet (Oh, he’d like to buy Samantha a drink, wink-wink!  Wait, he can't wink!)."

Here's his imitation of Samantha:

As you can see from the photo at the top of this post, Peggy and Matt wrote that another of his favorite things is "stealing Matt’s socks.  Even the lure of his favorite tug towel and a dab of peanut butter doesn’t tempt him to drop the sock.  He’ll even keep it safe while sleeping.  What a character!"

As in:

And now, here's the link to the video of Emmitt playing fetch … this is really something to see:

Watch Emmitt playing fetch here.

Thank you, Peggy and Matt!

—

Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for us every
day in The Animal Rescue
Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge. 
Thanks
to your votes, we came in third nationwide and won $3,000 for the
animals in the previous contest.  Now we have a shot at No. 1 and the
$20,000 grand prize!  Enter
"Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana,
and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Please ask
your family and friends to vote, too.  Thank you!