Good thoughts for Winnie

Our poor little Pooh Bear has been fighting a strange mystery disease since Thanksgiving. Everything started with urinary tract signs (mostly frequent urination, peeing in the house, etc). She was started on an antibiotic and all those signs cleared up, but a couple of days later she developed a fever. That started us on a wild goose change through her abdomen looking for the cause- did a bladder infection ascend to her kidneys? Did she eat something inappropriate? We sent out a urine culture (negative), checked bloodwork (normal aside from an elevated white blood cell count), and checked for tick-borne diseases (negative, plus she's on monthly tick preventatives). Radiographs revealed an enlarged spleen, so she had an abdominal ultrasound. Aside from a slightly prominent spleen, no other abnormalities were noted. A splenic aspirate was sent out- nothing really significant there either.

Winnie's fever persisted, so the hunt moved from her abdomen to her chest. Thoracic radiographs revealed consolidation of her right cranial lung lobe. Suspecting pneumonia, we started her on some more antibiotics, but her fever didn't really respond... So off to the U of MN teaching hospital she went. Although they agreed it would be strange for a middle-aged otherwise healthy dog to suddenly develop pneumonia, the radiographs and bloodwork were all consistent with pneumonia and didn't revealed any potential underlying causes. We decided to give the antibiotics a little more time to work, and Winnie's fever disappeared for a couple of days. Unfortunately, it came back... so Winnie went back to the U for a transtracheal wash to try and collect some of the organisms causing her pneumonia and culture them out. After a few days of waiting, nothing grew on her cultures. She had another day or two of being fever-free, but then it all started again. Her doctor then performed a fine-needle aspirate of the affected lung lobe, hoping to find the organisms causing her disease, but the samples just showed inflammatory cells. We added one more antibiotic to her regimen as well as an anti-inflammatory to give her some relief from the fever... which worked great until the drug wore off and the fever came right back.

After 2 1/2 weeks of trying different medications, we finally decided that we needed to try something else. Based on Winnie's age and the focal nature of her pneumonia, we suspected that she might have a migrating foreign body (i.e. she inhaled a seed or bit of a plant, which was travelling through her lungs and wreaking havoc). Unfortunately, Winnie was too small for bronchoscopy to be an option to explore the problem lung lobe. We finally bit the bullet and decided to take her for a CT scan and, if everything was still limited to her right cranial lobe, proceed to a lung lobectomy. Her CT scan was Thursday, and (because nothing in her case has gone as expected) the images showed that the lung lobe that had been looking bad was looking better, but now several of the lobes on her left side were looking affected. Sigh. She wasn't doing great under anesthesia, so she was recovered and went home on Thursday night. She returned to the U yesterday for a lung biopsy, in the hopes that getting a piece of tissue would be more likely to grow organisms in culture or show us any other underlying problems with her lung itself. Cytology yesterday unfortunately just came back as "neutrophilic inflammation" with no evidence of organisms... so now we wait for histopathology results to come in.

Winnie has been in the ICU since her biopsy with a chest tube in place. She's doing well, and if everything goes according to plan, she'll be going home in the next day or two. For now, we are onto yet another class of antibiotics to see if whatever's in her lungs responds. Winnie is being a trooper, and even though she hates the hospital and being in a kennel all day, she is tolerating everything pretty well.

So, please keep our little Winnie girl in your thoughts. It is miserable to be so far away from her during this, but her vets in Minnesota have all been fantastic and she's in the best hands. All we want for Christmas is a healthy corgi, and some answers about why she's been so sick!

Winnie kills a sick

Guess who's 5 today?!

Happy Birthday Pooh Bear!

Action shots at the dog park

I got a new light weight lens today for the camera for travel. We hit the dog park to test it out:

Play time

Winnie and Taiko are getting along! They are learning to play together, and it is incredibly funny. Taiko is still about 8x smaller than Winnie, so he gets tackled and tries to get out/paws at her head. He ends up covered in dog slobber, but he goes back for more each time!









Update: Cat in a hole!

I can has a book deal?

Well, not quite, but Winnie is going to be published! The offshoot of the cat-centric "I can has cheezburger" blog, the dog focused "I has a hotdog" is publishing a book of their best lol dogs, and Winnie is in there with the photo above! The book is scheduled for an April 20th release date.

Congratulations to Winnie for being the best wave Nomer I know! And to Megan for making the caption. And possibly to me for taking the photo (I'll have to check that though)

Busy busy

I've fallen behind in my rotation updates again, but I promise I'll post about blocks 14 (avian and exotics externship), 15 (my third Internal Medicine rotation), and 16 (radiology) soon! For now, I'm putting the finishing touches on my application for an internship and starting my last-minute cramming for boards. I feel pretty confident about small animal and exotic medicine questions, but pig diarrhea, equine colic, anything about poultry, and epidemiology are all still fuzzy. Study study study!

Poor Winnie wants to know when I'll have time to play again...

Happy Halloween!

basking

The sunshine... I loffs it.

Good news!

We got the biopsy results back from Winnie's masses that were removed last week, and good news! Both were benign masses called papillomas. I was a little nervous because masses in the mouth have a tendency to be bad news (think metastatic melanoma). Winnie is so young that she was at low risk for it to be anything serious, but cancer is always a possibility when dealing with masses.

So what is a canine oral papilloma? Also known as puppy warts, oral papillomas are cauliflower-like growths caused by a virus. The virus is contagious, so dogs often pick them up when engaging in "mouthy" play with other dogs at parks or doggy daycare. They don't usually cause problems unless they get large enough to interfere with chewing. They can be found in places other than the mouth, as in Winnie's case, where it started as a mass on her paw. The immune system will eventually clear the virus, although it can take weeks to months. Winnie is a little unusual in that she's on the old side to be getting puppy warts, so her vet is going to put her on a supplement to help support her immune system.

Now all that's left is for Winnie to survive the next couple days of sutures in her paw pad. She is a sad sad sight, but it's almost over!

If looks could kill....

Clean toofers

For all the Winnie fans out there, she came through her dental cleaning relatively unscathed today. She did have a mass removed from her paw pad that's been giving her problems since August, and while they were examining her mouth, they found a small mass and removed that too. She has a super-stylish pink bandage on her paw, and has to wear a bootie when she goes outside. She also has to wear an E-collar for the next couple of days to keep from tearing her bandage off. Winnie in an E-collar is a sad sight!

In lieu of get well cards, Winnie requests chicken, cookies, or ice cream please.

corgi haiku

sprawled out on her back

how does such a little dog

hog most of the bed?

Oh. Boy.

Just bought from Craigslist: for $40, a seemingly never used In-Step Quick-n-Light bike trailer for Winnie. We just took a ride in the rain because we couldn't wait to try it (we were busy all evening) and it rides great behind the Gitane. Winnie seemed a little unsure, but happy all the same. We feel a little dog nerdy but what the heck, it will be fun!

what a pretty bear she is

birthday girl

Happy Birthday Winnie!

Guess who's three years old today?

Home again

We're back from the woods, and what a great trip we had! The weather was perfectly sunny and warm almost every day, with a little wind and some nighttime storms thrown in for variety. As usual, photos do a better job of describing the trip than words, so here we go...


As Chris wrote earlier in the week, Winnie had the misfortune of cutting open her paw pad the day before we left. It was a fairly deep cut, and in a really lousy spot to keep clean and still while it healed. For most of the trip, she wore a sporty blue bandage secured with a few layers of medical tape. Thank goodness we practiced bandaging on her last semester!





When we first arrived, we were greeted by fields of yellow and orange hawkweed, daisies, and lupine. They must have really enjoyed the cool, wet spring, because we've never seen the flowers quite so prominent along the roadsides.









Chris and I celebrated our 5 year anniversary on July 1st with time on the dock, a little fishing, and a strawberry rhubarb pie. And we didn't mention wedding plans once :)











We had the best fishing we've seen in a few years, and caught enough smallmouth bass that we couldn't even finish our bass lunch. I played around with the ugliest lure that I've ever used- a silly floating frog that we found at a campsite last summer. It actually caught a fish!
















Even with an ouchy foot, Win could still enjoy a nice paddle.
















We ended our trip with a visit to hidden trout stream, where we caught the first mess of trout that we've had in a couple of years. It's definitely my new favorite spot for trout.



















Mmm, 16 nice brookies!










Winnie must have learned this trick from her old friend Moose- if you see them packing the car, you better pack yourself or else they might forget you!

Light at the end of the tunnel?

Now that it's starting to feel like spring, the doom and gloom and anxiety that tends to hang over school through late winter is starting to lift. We're also wrapping up some classes in anticipation of starting surgery in just over a week (!!!). This year, we'll be doing spays and neuters on shelter dogs and cats, although you don't know until the day of surgery whether you have a dog or a cat, or a male or female. The cat neuter is a really simple procedure, while the dog spay is usually the hardest, so there are people wishing for either end of the spectrum depending on how confident they feel about surgery. I think I'll be happy with whatever animal I get- I just want the surgery to go well...

Yesterday, we got a nice break from the recent string of downer Professional Skills lectures (animal abuse, child abuse, compassion fatigue, and how to not lose your license among them) with an elective class called "Vet Med and Literature". It's basically vet book club, where we talk about a selection of readings that have something to do with being a student or doctor. It was good to feel semi-human again after a long week of classes. This was my favorite reading:

Mark Doty
Beau: Golden Retrievals

Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention
seconds at a time. Catch? I don't think so.
Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who's -- oh
joy -- actually scared. Sniff the wind, then

I'm off again, muck, pond ditch, residue
of any thrillingly dead thing. And you?
Either you're sunk in the past, half our walk,
thinking of what you never can bring back,

or else you're off in some fog concerning
--tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work:
to unsnare time's warp (and woof), retrieving,
my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,

a Zen master's bronzy gong, calls you here,
entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.

--Beau

To tug or not to tug?

There aren't many dog games that have ignited such fierce debates as tug-o-war. No one argues about the merits of fetch or frisbee, but there are two schools of thought about tug. One side says that tug is a dangerous game that teaches dogs dominance, and that they can use physical force to gain a prized possion from a human. In order to maintain the role as "pack leader", you should never allow a dog to think he can wrestle something away from you. Dogs should willingly give up even the most valuable goodies, and if they don't, they are exerting dominance over you. If you do engage in a game of tug, they say, at least the human should always end up with the toy at the end lest the dog leave thinking he won.

On the other side of the debate are people who say that tug-o-war is just a game, and a good game to really unwind and let off some pent-up energy. Play serves a very important role in animal behavior, even for wild animals. The great thing about play is that all normal rules are off and normal roles are often reversed. The bigger puppy turns down his strength so that the littler puppy can wrestle with him. Motions are exaggerated, and normally stealthy animals become rambunctious and noisy. Current thinking about the reason that animals play is to put their body into positions and situations that they wouldn't normally be in. This allows them to learn how to react to the unexpected (like getting knocked off their feet by a predator). The bigger puppy learns how it feels when he's the weaker one, and the littler puppy learns what he needs to do when he's winning the wrestling match.

Behaviorist Patricia McConnell writes about tug in her book The Other End of The Leash. She sides with the people who say it's just a game, and not about a fight for dominance. Tug, like any other form of play, is about letting animals experience roles they might not otherwise have. When Winnie and I play tug, it's a time for her to growl, show her teeth, and refuse to let go of a toy- behaviors that, outside of tug, we wouldn't tolerate. McConnell believes that dogs who have a playful outlet for normally unacceptable behaviors are less likely to exhibit those behaviors in an inappropriate setting. She also cites a study about dogs who were allowed to play tug- half of the dogs never got to win, and half got to win some matches and lose others. The dogs who never got to win simply quit playing, because who likes to lose all the time? It's not a game anymore if you never win.

Obviously I lie in the pro-tug camp. I tend not to buy into dominance-style thinking anyway, but I also have played tug with enough dogs to know that dogs know the difference between play and normal life. However, there are a few important points about safe tug-o-war:

• any contact between skin and teeth immediately ends the game, accidental or not. Dogs are very aware of where their teeth are, and need to know that they have to have complete control even during play. It's especially effective if you let out a loud YIP! and walk away looking extremely offended.
• You get to call off the game whenever you want. Before playing tug, dogs should know what "drop it" means, and should follow that command even in the middle of the game. If they don't drop when you tell them to, game over. Dogs hate when the game ends early.
• If you're working on specific behavior issues like resource guarding, tug probably isn't the best game to play.
  

These points aren't about maintaining 'alpha dog' position, but about dogs being polite and knowing that there are some boundaries that can't be crossed, even during play.

Happy tugging!