Little Scare

Things have been going very well with Addie as of late.  No cold paw incidents, she is eating well, and is about as active as a 13 1/2 year old girl can be!  She does have some stability issues, but I believe that is caused more from losing muscle mass from age and her vestibular incident last year. 

However, over the past 2 weeks, we have noticed that she cannot hold her bladder as long as normal.  She occassionally has to get up in the middle of the night and can only go about 5 hours.  Not like when she has had urinary tract infections (UTI's) in the past though.  She also was drinking a lot more water. 

We took her to Dr. Friedly last week to see if he could find the cause. We were thinking the worst.. not sure what that was, but possibly kidney issues.  He ran blood work, and all was relatively normal.  We then did a urinalysis today.  Major infection.  Another UTI.  Although a major infection is not great, I will take it over kidney failure, etc. 

So our girl is on antibiotics and some other UTI meds, to help her out.  Going forward, she will also be getting some holistic UTI chews to help keep more infections from occurring.  This is probably her 4th UTI within the last 18 months.  The vet said not much we can do to help prevent them, it is just her less-effective immune system, but hopefully the meds and chews will help.

Yahoo Groups

This is one of my favorite pictures of Addie - taken right after she had her daily cottage cheese. We call it Cheese Face :-)

I subscribe to several Yahoo groups focused around dogs with cancer. I get an email every day from all of them with questions, answers, and stories. At first I read everyone one word for word. But what I realized after some time, is that although they provide a wealth of helpful information, they can get so depressing. It seems every day a member of the group posts that their companion, the one they were trying to save, didn't make it. They passed over the Rainbow Bridge as they say. I now find that I often skim the titles and try to avoid any with the word 'bridge' in them. I know others are pouring their hearts out after doing everything they possibly could, but after 2 1/2 years, it just makes me feel so bad.

Recently, someone posted and asked those that had "miracle dogs" - those that had dogs that have lived long past their Dr. diagnosed date, to give some feedback in a survey. I was happy to help and it was good to have something to work towards. What if hundreds of people contribute to the survey and we find a trend? Maybe not likely, but the hope that is for new people joining the group, they will have one place to go to see all the various treatments people have tried and what successes/losses have occurred. It may not save all the dogs, but I am eager to help out in something positive - something hopefully will help others who unfortunately find themselves subscribing to various Yahoo groups as I did 2 1/2 years ago feeling overwhelmed.

Maybe someday all these groups can be discontinued as we will no longer need it as there will be a cure... maybe someday.