So not much to say, or time to say it. I took these pictures of Jakester tonight. As a result of my spoiling him he’s become uber-clingy and wants to be held all the time. Or stuck in my sports bra to kind of lounge across my chest in the mornings. Anyway, they’re blurry and badly lit and I really like them anyway.

We went to see the vet this morning so Jake could have his blood-platelet count tested. The vet tried to get the blood from his arm but apparently he wasn’t having it, so they had to stick him in the jugular. This when he’s got a clotting problem. Anyway, there’s a little hole there, but they say he stopped bleeding pretty quickly.

I will get the results of this test on Tuesday, but they’re probably going to be a little misleading. Since he had a plasma transfusion last week he’s apparently running on borrowed platelets. The vet said that the ones he got should last about two weeks, and hopefully by the time his body destroys those it will have also started making new ones of its own, thanks to the steroids. If it hasn’t I don’t know if he will need another transfusion to hold him over while they start new (stronger) meds, or what will happen. Overall he seems well, but his gums are still really pale, and that bothers me. One good thing is that the vet found a chewable form of prescription Vitamin K for him that is only about $5 a week, as opposed to the prescription Vitamin K we had to get at Walgreen’s that was $80 for a two-week supply. This whole ordeal is kicking my savings account squa in the nuts, so that was some welcome news. Jake is now a member of Walgreen’s prescription savings club though, which I find hilarious. He has his own account, and I would have to pay a fee if I wanted to use it for me too.

After the vet we had to go to the grocery store which was right next to the vet, and I was not driving 20 minutes home to drop him off and then 20 minutes back just because society somehow thinks that dogs in bags are less hygienic than toddlers running around wiping their grubby hands on everything. (Sorry if you’ve got toddlers and think they’re all swell & totally clean, but this is a pet pet peeve.) So even though I’ve never really carted Jake around in a bag like I did Bruiser, I found one big enough for him and snuck him into Trader Joe’s. He did fine, just chilled out in there once he was all zipped up and no one called me out on it, so that was good.

Now we’re home and I need to get started on kicking out some serious words for NaNoWriMo, which is why I took all these Fridays off in the first place. But first - lunch.

So tomorrow I have to go back to work, and that means I have to leave Jake here. He’s been fine all weekend, acting like he feels well, no bleeding, vomiting, petechia, nothing to give me any cause for immediate concern. But I can’t get over the feeling that as soon as he’s out of my sight something’s going to to wrong. I am nauseated at the thought of leaving him for 8 hours.

I wish that the vet(s) could have given me a prognosis that was more reassuring, or at least gave me something more concrete for my mind to chew on. Like: If “x” he will be fine, if “y” there is a problem. Right now it’s more like: if “x, y or q” there’s a problem. If none of those, there may still be a problem.

So tomorrow I am going to have to go sit at a stupid place and deal with fuckwitted morons, addressing problems of no consequence to people who will never understand WTF is going on around them, all in service to a useless cause, when all I want to do is stay home with my little guy. Life sucks like that. We have to spend all our time doing shit we hate, in order to afford the one or two things in the world we care about. Because that stupid ass job is what gave me the cash I needed to treat Jake. It pays for our house and his food. But it also sucks away part of my soul every single time I have to go to it.

Someday I have a dream of being able to afford truly employer-independent health care, and being able to survive on the income I could get from freelance work. Maybe.

So tomorrow I am going in early in case I need to leave early to run Jake to the vet for blood work. If I do, that means I will be expecting results on Tuesday. I am also seeing my new endocrinologist on Tuesday. Tuesday’s also when a little national election is happening too. You may have heard a little about that.

All in all, I think I am going to be looking forward to Wednesday when - even if it’s not the news I want - I will have some news, and get out of horrible anxiety filled waiting/limbo land.

/Sunday Rantings. Have a good week everyone.

Around 6:30 on Tuesday night I noticed that Jake had a rash. It spread across his chest and left little pin prick red dots all over his belly and the insides of his legs. There were red marks on the side of his head, the top of his head, the underside of his chin, he was red and spotty all over. I thought he had poison ivy, I took and posted pictures on flickr to see if anyone could confirm. I gave him a bath in case he still had something on him that was irritating him, but as he seemed to not be itchy and otherwise feeling well, I didn’t worry. Truthfully I worried more about catching poison ivy myself. We went to bed and the next morning he was his normal bouncy self. Still some red, but it was fading. There were a few new spots too, but I just figured it was part of the cycle. I went to work. I worried about him during the day, but when I got home he was normal, running around, eating and peeing and pooping, fine. We chilled.

Thursday morning I woke up and was getting ready for work when Jake barfed. That’s not atypical Jake behavior, he’s a barfy little guy. But he barfed what looked like a clear brownish reddish liquid. Blood. I sniffed it. Blood. We headed to the vet. At this point my best guess was that he’d eaten something (I thought a pork chop bone that he’d found in the yard) that irritated his throat and gave him hives because it was gross and dirty. Sometime I think I go to the vet too much, I don’t want to be an over-reacting doggy-mama. I was really expecting them to say that he was fine. I asked to see Dr. Gilbert b/c the asshole blond vet was on duty too.

Sidenote: He is the stupidest, most unfeeling assfaced fucktard. For one thing it’s clear he doesn’t like small dogs. I’ve seen him with labs and rotties and other big animals, and he’s all over them. Whenever he’s seen my dogs he’s been a stupid ass, talking in circles, nonchalant no matter the problem, refusing to speak clearly. It’s hard to explain but if you’re a mom and you’ve been to an asshole doctor w/your kid you would get it. He makes no sense, and he talks to me as if it’s my fault he’s making no sense. He’s also incredibly nonchalant, no matter what he’s telling you. This summer he recommened an operation on Bruiser (despite her advanced age and heart murmur) to remove a lump on her stomach that eventually went away on its own. He didn’t even know what it was, but he wanted to anesthetize her and remove it. He also said that they’d just “go ahead and do a dental” on her while she was out. He didn’t even LOOK AT HER MOUTH to see that she’d just HAD a dental. Ass.

Dr. Gilbert is the doctor who helped Princess B through her Xylitol poisoning, and I trust her, as well as respect the way she talks to me about what’s happening. We saw her and I pointed out the rash and then that he’d been vomiting what looked like blood. That’s when she explained that this wasn’t a rash, this was petechia. If you watch crime shows you know that’s what’s in the victim’s eye whites when they’ve been strangled. It’s itty bitty bleeding under the skin. For some reason Jake was bleeding internally, and from his stomach. She thought it might be poison, like he ate rat poison or the carcass of a rat that died of rat poisoning. She said that it was very serious, that I should be prepared that it was very serious. I prepared myself by starting to cry helplessly. She went to take some blood from him and she was gone a loooong time. When she came back she said she’d double checked her first idea in a book, then called a specialist vet, and now she thought it wasn’t toxin-related, but was an auto-immune response. His body was attacking his own platelets and destroying them, so his blood couldn’t clot anymore. They had to have the bloodwork to confirm one way or the other, but in the meantime she was sending us to Veterinary Specialty Services at 141 & Manchester. This is a full-fledged animal hospital with an ICU and all kinds of equipment most vets don’t have. They see patients by referral from a regular vet only. She sent us there, saying that we had “a few hours left” to start treating him. I was very scared.

We went out to the VSS place and saw Dr. Greer. She explained that she needed the bloodwork to confirm, but this was a classic presentation for something called immune-mediated thrombocytopenia (IMT). She said that there were many reasons that a dog could present with IMT, and explained the bloodwork, ultrasound and x-ray things they could do to try to determine why it was happening to Jake. She also said that in 75% of the cases, even with doing that extensive workup, they still don’t figure out what is causing it. No matter the cause, the treatment is the same. The tests she was talking about were $1200-1800. What did I want to do? Fuck. That’s one of those moments in dog ownership where you think the person talking to you is going to think you’re a dickhole. Luckily before I left the other clinic Dr. Gilbert had talked to me about this a bit and said that in her opinion the whole workup wasn’t necessary b/c the treatment really didn’t depend on the cause. So I said no to the full workup, and she said that she wanted to keep him there while they waited for the bloodwork results that Dr. Gilbert was running. I asked if they would be treating him during that time, or just observing him. She said just observing him. I told her that I would observe him at home then, until the results came back, that I preferred him to be with me if possible. She said there was a chance that he would need a blood or plasma transfusion if he’d been poisoned, and he’d have to come back to the hospital for that. If it wasn’t poison the treatment was long-term steroids, antibiotics and vitamins to get him stable and get his body to stop attacking itself. She said the survival rate for dogs with this condition was 50%, even with treatment, though she said she was very encouraged by how he was still eating. Jake was still staring at us, wagging his tail and acting like he felt fine. We determined that if it was IMT I could pick up the necessary drugs at the original vet (much closer to me) and I went home to wait for her phone call. She told me to keep him from moving much and/or further bruising himself. I tucked him in the baby sling and carried him around with me all day long.

Dr. Greer called around 2 or so, saying that he was not poisoned, he did have IMT and that I should give it about an hour and then go pick up meds for him at the original vet. I asked her if it was OK to leave him alone while I ran that errand and she said yes. Then the Dr. Gilbert called. She said Jake’s blood counts were “off the charts” and that Dr. Greer (who I’d just talked to) had told Dr. Gilbert that he needed a plasma transfusion. What? She didn’t say that to me. Dr. Gilbert said that his blood was not clotting at all, and that he had a much better chance with a transfusion and and overnight stay with Dr. Greer. She said that Dr. Greer said I refused to leave him with her. What? I never said that. I said I preferred to keep him with me until the diagnosis was finalized. I told Dr. Gilbert that, and what Dr. Greer had told me about him being fine to leave alone, which didn’t fit with Dr. Gilbert’s assertiont that he was about to drop dead of spontaneous bleeding any second.

Dr. Gilbert called Dr. Greer back, then called me back, acting as if I was trying to not treat Jake well. She said that he was going to continue to deteriorate without the treatment, that he had only a 10% chance of survival without the plasma. She acted like I was saying I wasn’t going to treat him at all - and all I wanted to know what was the fuck everyone was talking about, since they couldn’t get their stories straight. I said fine, I was taking him back to VSS if that was the case, and I did. They kept him overnight and transfused him with plasma. We’re actually very lucky that there was a facility with this capability here in the St. Louis area. The info I read about IMT recommended a plasma transfusion,  but said it was rarely possible for financial and practical reasons.

I left him there Thursday afternoon, and they called me on Friday morning to say that he was responding very well to the treatment and was eating, acting like he felt well. I could pick him up at 4 p.m.

I did, and he looks good. Acts like he feels well. He’s on 4 medications, prednisone, doxycylcine (sp?) Vitamin K and Pepcid AC because the other ones may make him barfy. He has to go in early next week for blood work, I have to watch him for bruising, petechia, bleeding from any orifice, lethargy or vomiting. He’s going to be hungry, drinking a lot of water and peeing more in the house probably. I can deal with that.

The original bloodwork he had at the vet was $168. Seeing the emergency vet was $95. The overnight stay with plasma transfusion was $498. I had to go to three different pharmacies last night to fill his Vitamin K prescription, and a two-week supply of the pills was $80. I don’t know if I will have to refill those or not, or if I can get them cheaper somewhere. I don’t know what the rest of this bloodwork is going to cost in the upcoming weeks. Obviously I would pay all this and more, gladly, to make him better, but this does mean my Christmas vacation with Todd is now canceled. No biggie. I am gladder than I can tell you that I had the money to spend, I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have to refuse something he needed because I couldn’t afford it.

So that’s what happened, leaving out for the most part how I felt about it. Well, you can imagine. I cried so hard I was sick. I cried so hard that I had scabs under my eyes because the skin got so raw. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t breathe without him. I can’t imagine the cruelty of taking him away from me, and I didn’t realize what this house would feel like with him not in it. He’s the goofiest, most joyous thing I come in regular contact with, and his pure glee at being able to run around and follow my every move with his big googly eyeballs is contagious. You can’t be as unhappy as my soul wants to be when Jake is around. The thought of anything bad happening to his innocent little body was devastating. I think it broke another part of me that couldn’t really afford to become any more fucked up. I feel drained, I feel dead inside, I feel raw and exposed and terrified and anxious. I still don’t know if he’s going to live. I still don’t know what caused this. So for now my entire being is holding its breath, pretending to be alive while we wait to see if we survive this.

More on Jakester later, you can check my twitter feed for the ongoing saga until I have time to write it up properly.

But tonight, when something’s really wrong with him, and when the house is stripped of all of its joy, that’s when you know what it means to have something really wrong in your personal world. And preparing yourself for it, being cynical and fatalistic and pessimistic - that doesn’t help.

You’re no better prepared to dodge the pain when it comes by refusing to feel the joy when it’s here.

For two years now, every single time I get home I open the door and start counting. One… two… three furry butts come to greet me. I watch them rush out into the yard all together, and if one is delayed or takes longer (for instance Princesses B and C like to sleep on the second floor sometimes, and take a while to hear me get back.) I immediately start thinking they’re dead somewhere. They’re hurt, injured, sick, they’re dying. I just know that today’s the day the dream ends, the luck runs out, the happiness goes away. Every single time I come home, I count.

And tonight I dropped Jake off at the hospital and I came home and opened the door and I counted. And only two came. And it broke my heart.

We’re some cranky old bitches around here. Bruiser wants warm laps, warm blankets and to be left alone. Chelsea wants to be invisible, skulking in the corners, easily startled, flees when you look at her too long. I am a notoriously cranky, misanthropic, unhappy wretch. The only one of us around here with a decent personality is lovable, happy-go-lucky old Jake. Not a care in the world Jake, “Why you growling at me when I stand on your head? Don’t you want your head stood on?” Jake. Watching his furry, bouncy little booty navigate the stairs in the morning… his pure excitement to be awake and alive and GOING OUTSIDE and GETTING TO EAT, it’s infectious. I need him. We all three need him, but I need him most. I need him to be OK.

And even though I’ve been thinking that my cranky refusal to be happy was going to be protection once it came time to feel sad, I am finding it’s woefully inadequate, because I am shattered. Please send good thoughts our  way.

The ways they contort, and methods they use to keep their noses warm, always amuse me.

This one’s a little fuzzy, I know, but I still thought it was cute.

Dogs. We love them in part because they have no dignity.

Yes, yes. I have two chew toys and she has none. Your point being?

Truthfully, I do not like the way you are looking at my chew toys. Please avert your eyes so that I may rest next to them.

…r bone, I don’t want nobody’s bone, bay-beh!

So trying to meet goals for the day. Three out of four isn’t bad, I think.

1. Household. I did the laundry and carried the vacuum cleaner down two flights of stairs to give the downstairs rug a good hoovering.

2. Exercise. I took Jakester over to Lafayette Square Park and walked around for half an hour. He’s totally petrified of everything, and horrible to walk with. I might make myself walk him more by focusing on the benefit for him, getting more socialized. I may take la Chelseapants next time though, she seems to walk better than the other two.

3. Social Stuffs. This one is harder for me, especially during the week. But after our walk I drove Jake over to Todd’s house, on the off chance that he’d be back from his class. He was! WIN! So I chatted with him for awhile about our respective first days of school, and updated his iTunes so that he could buy movies.

4. Creative. Hrms. Nothing so far. And now I am really only wanting to take a shower, finish the laundry and go to bed. But maybe I will think of something?

5. Spending large amounts of money. My laptop was indeed on the verge of failure. When I talked to the IT guy at work he told me that I needed to get my stuff off of it, sooner rather than later. So I bought a new laptop. Well. I ordered a new laptop, which doesn’t relieve my buyers remorse the way it would if I could have brought it home with me today. But overall it was a really good buy. It’s a Sony Vaio, and it blows my old laptop out of the water as far as RAM and HD capacity, plus it’s lighter, with a larger screen. And… it’s pink. I know! But seriously, it’s also a good laptop for my needs, in addition to being pink! I checked! It’s a model that’s on its way out for them, so it was discounted in price, then I found it at newegg $150 or so cheaper than MSRP, then I found it on Best Buy’s website $100 cheaper than THAT even! So, I practically made a profit.

My “nervous about spending money” threshold is around $200 or so, anything over that and I start to triple-guess myself. So this makes me angsty. But I am sure that will all go away once I have it. I had it shipped to work (less chance of it getting delivered to my neighbor, who I am still dodging quite well.) and I really hope it will come before the weekend. My only decision still to be made is whether I am going to wipe Vista off of it when it gets here and install XP. I feel like I would rather, since I use XP on my desktop and at work, and plus I don’t want to be the person with Vista, because I hate it without trying it like all good Intertubes dwellers should.

Anwyay, that’s my day today. Now, off to be creative…

Those that come immediately to mind are “anxious” and “handitarded”

Todd was creeped out tonight by Jake’s tendency to sleep in zombie-mode. I have to admit, even I had to look and make sure he was still breathing - there’s a lot of eye white going on there.

Our flash photography woke him up though.

This is Jake’s patented foot-pounce/pet maneuver. First he lays down next to my toes and swats them with his paws, like so:

then he waits for me to poke him with my foot to get him to stop:

Then he lays back for the belly-rubbing to commence. And adopts a crazyface/boxer pose.

This morning Jake decided it would be a great idea to see what electrical cords taste like. I was sitting in my office at 6:30 a.m. drinking tea, browsing my RSS feeds, trying to wake up when I suddenly hear the most horrific screaming coming from the side of my desk where the dogs’ beds are. I thought Jake and Chelsea might be fighting, but when I jumped up to intervene I saw Jake laying on his side, his jaw locked around the white extension cord he’d just chewed into. The current had locked his jaw around it and he couldn’t let go.

I knew I was not supposed to touch him until I got the power off, but I couldn’t help grabbing him and trying frantically to pry his jaws apart. I couldn’t get them open and he was screaming in pain, causing me to freak out and the other two dogs to run in crazy circles. I tried to pull the cord from the wall, but realized it was plugged in across the room and behind a table. I redoubled my efforts and finally got his mouth open. He scrambled away, still screaming in pain and fear. By this time I was screaming too. He ran downstairs and crawled under the kitchen table, and I followed him down there, bawling hysterically, sure that any second he was going to keel over dead of heart failure. He sat under the table, not continuously screaming any more, but letting out these piteous howling/screaming sounds every few seconds. I didn’t want to agitate him, so I went and sat on the couch, hoping he would come to me. Eventually he came out and went to lay in the bed in the corner, looking at me all bug-eyed and distrustful. I got a hold of him and looked at him, he seemed to be breathing normally. I carried him upstairs and Googled “Help, my dog just electrocuted himself” or something similar. What I found was that in most cases the dog is knocked unconscious and their heart stops. Most of the first-aid advice dealt with how to get their heart started again. In a case like Jake’s where they’d been shocked but not knocked out, I had to look for burns in his mouth and watch him for signs of shock. There was a chance his heart and/or lungs had been damaged too.

I looked at him, and he looked back at me all googly-eyed, like nothing had happened. I decided that we were going to the vet no matter what, I wanted him checked over. I still thought he was going to keel over any second, and I just kept thinking “He could have died just then. He could have died just then. He really could have died. That would be it. No more googly-eyed retard Jake, all his short little boundless-energy-filled life would have been gone, over, done.” You may guess as to whether I was also working myself into greater and greater heights of hysteria by now.

I emailed work to let them know I wouldn’t be in for the morning, and we went off to the vet. Their vet opens at 8 a.m. and I got there at 7:45, so I stood outside the door with him in my arms, looking to see if I thought his gums were pale, trying to see if his mouth was burned, and crying like Nancy Kerrigan. I went in at 8 and the doctor looked him over, had a peek inside his mouth, listened to his heart and said that he was not in shock, and the chances of him going into shock at this point were very small. However, he did hear a slight heart murmur, and there was none when I had him in for his shots a month or so ago. Heart murmurs are not normal in dogs his age, and he didn’t know if that could be caused by a jolt of electricity. Also I have to bring him back tomorrow for an x-ray of his lungs, since he could start to form small pulmonary edemas. Those wouldn’t be visible for the first 24 hours, the damage takes some time to develop. Overall he pronounced Jake incredibly lucky. The only reason I can think of why this didn’t kill him is that he was chewing an extension cord and none of the items plugged into the cord were actually on. I think that would mean that there is less electricity flowing through it, right? I don’t know. It’s not my area. But maybe he got the minimum jolt. As far as I can recall he’s never chewed an electrical cord before, I don’t know what possessed him to start now, but I think that when I get home this afternoon I am going to rearrange the office so that their bed is nowhere near any cords or outlets.

When I left him (around 9:30) he was happy as a clam, chewing on a chew toy that I gave him (so I don’t think his mouth hurts, even) and that’s how I hope to find him tonight when I get home.

Here’s the cord he chewed, with blood from his mouth and maybe a little puppy fur on it, though I don’t know if you can see that at this resolution.