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Wonderful Life!
Well I had a great surprise at lunch yesterday. I had lunch with a woman that had been my soul-mate, best friend, sister, more-than-family member for over 20 yrs-until she decided in 2001 that we could no longer be that way.
Fast forward nine years- or eight since it was last summer- when she got very ill and was in the hospital with a massive staph infection that resulted in her having her hip replacement replaced and her knee replacement replaced. (She has two artificial knees and one hip)
I was there for her. I was there for her daughter who has two girls and a boy on the way. I went down there and stayed by her side and I was the one that helped guide them through the medical mess, jargon and eventually told her to check herself out of the hospital because she was getting worse instead of better. I stuck around and rubbed lotion on her feet when she got home (with no hip on one side, by the way) and I was there to bring her food and her prescriptions. Now I am not saying this to be a martyr, I am just saying that despite what happened in the past, I wanted her to know that in my heart she was still my bestfriend/soulmate/sister. So I let it be.
Now, after her daughter's baby shower, I still haven't heard a lot from her and we used to talk almost daily. That is okay. We live busy lives etc. So she asked me to lunch yesterday- a late 3 pm lunch and I brought her a peach gel that cools you off in the summer and sort of shimmers. I had a card that read- Sow a seed of friendship- and harvest a bouquet of joy.
I wrote that I hoped we could 're-grow' our friendship and that I have never stopped missing having her in my life and that she would always be family to me. I just stated the facts. I had already come to acceptance that we might never be or have what we once did. I am okay with that.
Well much to my surprise, she grabbed and hugged me and said yes!! I feel the same way! That is what I want too. I was floored. I said,"Really?" She said yes. I said it again, Really? She said I think if we both work at this we can have a great friendship or something like that.. to be honest my head was reeling. I was totally not expecting this.
As I said, I was okay with us at least speaking to each other. My daughter calls us her two Moms- that is how close we were and how involved she was with my kids. She pulled me out of the depths of my suicidal thoughts when my ex was making me think I was crazy(on purpose I found out). She was there for me the whole time. She was there when D broke up with me the first time and I was going slowly hysterically insane on my lawn, beating trees and bushes with a rake I was so freaked out and upset. (Man have I grown up!!).
So yes, this was a wonderful thing. We had a great sushi lunch and then I found a beautiful Myers Lemon in full bloom at the nursery we went to afterward for only $24. and no sales tax! I have been wanting one for years and the only one I found was $50 for the same size. The 10 gallon one I had seen at a nursery was $100!! That is insane! This is a 5 gallon dwarf and it is gorgeous.
So I had the most wondrous day!! Today is gorgeous also so I am going to sit outside and work and draw then clean my house. LIFE IS WONDERFUL!!!
Now, I will just keeping manifesting the man of my dreams into my life!!!
Happy Sunday everyone!
Ask the Vet Tech
Hello everyone. I am going to make this short but I wanted to spread the word about my new Vet Tech Blog. It's a simple advice blog where you can write me a question about some pet care and I will do my best to answer it for you.
I cannot nor will I diagnose anything for you. Only a licensed veterinarian can do that. I can give you advice about the condition and what to ask your vet and whether or not the vet even needs to be called- such as when cats come home from being spayed and the other cats are all hissing at her. Situations such as that.
So check it out and let me know what you think. I will be writing on topics of veterinary care also such as dentals, diets, nutrition etc.
Come on by and let me know what you think eh?
I am also posting now at EFX3.com but will stay here also.
So here is the address of the new blog.
http://askthevettech.com/
I also launched a HOOGE web site today that has been almost a year in the making.
You can find that here at http://jazzitupsparklers.com/
See you all later! It's bedtime for me....
The weekend from Hell...
This has been one of the worst weekends of my life. I drove to Oakhurst to see my Dad and niece, which is two hours south east of Sonora along majorly windy roads. My clutch,which had been slipping off and on, died, burned, fried and stopped at the top of a big hill, only 9 miles from town. I was on a side turnout, a big one thanks goodness. It was around 2:30 in the afternoon on Friday. I call my niece, she shows up with my Dad, whom we call Poppa,and he stays with me in the car while we wait for a tow truck. We waited almost three FLIPPING hours in the cold and rain for this truck. A CHP even stopped and called dispatch to find out where the truck was. In the meantime, her bf calls around and gets Big O tire to do the job on a Sat, which they normally won't do,AND they push 3 other jobs back to do this for him (me). He is a mechanic (out of work) and they were impressed by him so he may get a job out of it.
In the meantime, Poppa and I are sitting in the car and he tells me that Trea, who was my Mom's guide dog, wasn't feeling well that morning so Nanci, his (adopted) daughter who lives with him, took her into the vet's.He did some xrays etc and said if she wasn't feeling well later to take her to the ER vet. He couldn't find anything amiss except that her blood proteins were a bit low.
Trea got worse and worse and by this afternoon she was flat and couldn't get up,so Nanci rushed her into the ER vets. It went downhill from there.
I picked up my car and it wouldn't go forward or backward. It felt like the hill-holder clutch, something that Subarus have,was stuck on. I know the feeling as I had another Subby do it to me and I remember the feeling. It almost feels like the emergency brake is stuck on,which is what the guy at Big O thought. So Sky, my nieces bf, is fixing it and I am on the phone with the vet. I tell her I am a vet tech with 30 yrs experience and so she tells me the truth in terms I can understand but Poppa can't so I tell him later. I am crying when I get in the car. It looks bad. Worse than bad.
Golden Retrievers (Trea was half Golden, half yellow Lab, a favorite mix for guide dogs) and shephards are prone to a very nasty, highly metastizing and invasive cancer called hemagiosarcoma. There was a slim chance she had gotten into some rat traps that the pest guy had left but they were untouched.
The vet barely had her stable,she was bleeding out into her chest cavity. We got home and she called me again and told me that she was 99% sure that is what Trea had. I told Poppa and he told Nanci to tell the vet to put her down. The vet was wonderful on the phone with me, wonderful with Trea. I asked her to please do a necropsy because I had to know what was wrong, and she called me with the results and told me she had the cancer all through her chest and heart even.
Trea was only 8 yrs old. My Mom will be gone three years this March and the Guide Dogs organization had given her back to us after my Mom died. We were blessed with her incredibly intelligent, gentle and sweet soul for three more years. Trea was a volunteer for years at Kaiser with my folks and after my Mom died she started to be a volunteer at Hospice and went with Poppa there every week. Everyone knew her and loved her.She had her own volunteer sweaters she wore that replaced the guide dog harness of my Mom's. She was even in videos and brochures for Hospice.
While I can slowly accept that she is gone, I am having a harder time accepting I will not see her again the next time I am up there. She was as much as part of my Mom's last years as the house she left behind. All I have now is my Poppa and he will be 86 in April. He is hurting too, but he is more private about it and moves on quicker than I do. That is a good thing, for him. I just grieve longer-it's who I am. I will be grieving over this for a while. I will miss this dog as much as I do my own Cameo. Tonight my heart is shattered.
Good bye Trea Long. We will all miss you so very,very much. May you run long and hard and I pray that you are up there with my Mom and that she is crying tears of joy over seeing you and isn't sad about us losing you.
first picture we ever had of Trea with my Mom--still in guide dog school..
Trea and my great-nieces the week my Mom died.
Oh my God I cannot believe how much this hurts. I love that dog so much. She was just the most incredible dog- so smart she was scary at times. She saved my Mom's life more than once and even Poppa's when they were just out for a walk. She loved to lay on the floor and hold her paw up for you to hold in your hand- and she wouldn't stop for as long as you would hold it! It was her favorite pastime when she wasn't working.
She understood us all with total completeness and acceptance.When I was there, she would come wake me up in the morning with kisses all over my face which made me smile as I woke up. I am going to miss that so much. It was so hard to go to Poppa's house knowing my Mom wasn't there but Trea always made it easier for me since she was a link to my Mom.
And now that last link is broken and gone. The worst part for me, being a vet tech, is thinking about the horrible things afterward, like how her sweetness and life is gone and she is lying cold in a freezer. And yes I shouldn't think of that stuff but that was part of my life for over 28 yrs. It is impossible for those things to not cross my mind.
The only solace I have at all is knowing she never suffered once and that she indeed had something we couldn't have prevented or even known about. She lived and full and happy, loved and loving life. I guess that is all I could have ever hoped for her, no matter how long or short it was.
Heartworm Prevention in Dogs-Is it needed year round?
I just read a great article by Veterinarian Dwight D. Bowman, MS, PhD, who is a professor of parasitology at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, College of Veterinary Medicine, Cornell University,N.Y.
It is a tongue in cheek look at the typical complaint we hear about giving heartworm prevention year round to both dogs and cats. He makes some very good points about WHY we recommend that you keep your pet on prevention year round. The bolding is mine to emphasis the ludicrousness of the statement.
Here is the article:
March 1, 2007
Commentary: An argument for year-round heartworm prevention in dogs
By Dwight D. Bowman, MS, PhD
Find the non sequitur in the following series of statements: Heartworms cause severe lung disease in dogs and cats and can kill them. Heartworms cause zoonotic disease in people. Heartworm disease can be prevented in dogs and cats by giving them medication once a month that also controls various internal and external parasites. Heartworm infections are diagnosed in about 250,000 dogs each year.1 But there is no good reason for dogs to receive preventives all year; it is just not needed.
THE RISK
Now let's do some math. The risk of a dog's being infected with heartworm disease each year is 250,000 out of 50,000,000; this translates to one in 200 dogs becoming infected each year. The chance that you will be diagnosed with cancer this year is about one in 200—the same odds as a dog's acquiring heartworm disease.2 Yet heartworm disease in dogs is virtually 100% preventable. Would you take medication once a month to prevent being diagnosed with cancer this year? But there is no good reason for dogs to receive preventives all year; it is just not needed.
THE TREATMENT
Now let's look at the heartworm treatment options. Melarsomine dihydrochloride, an arsenical, is the treatment for heartworm infections in dogs; nothing is approved to treat cats. Melarsomine is given at a dose of 2.5 mg/kg. The LD50 for organic arsenic in mongrel dogs is 14 mg/kg.3 A three-fold overdose of melarsomine can be lethal.4 To put this in perspective, the epa has set the limit for arsenic in drinking water at 10 parts per billion5 —that is 10 µg/L—based on a no-effect risk of 1 to 10,000 to 1 to 1,000,000. So if you drink 10 L of water each day containing arsenic at the maximum allowable level, you would consume 100 µg of arsenic a day, or 36.5 mg of arsenic a year. A 50-kg dog receives a total dose of 250 mg of melarsomine, which contains about 37.5 mg of arsenic, in two injections. It would take one year of drinking high levels of arsenic in your water to get the same dose of arsenic given to a dog to treat heartworm disease. Thus, the dose for killing heartworms in dogs is far from a negligible amount. But there is no good reason for dogs to receive preventives all year; it is just not needed.
THE PATHOLOGY
Of course, treatment with arsenicals is far better than the long-term effects of large worms living in the pulmonary arteries of their hosts. The lungs do get better after treatment.6 The adult heartworms are long: males are 12 to 20 cm long, females are 25 to 31 cm long, and both are about 1 mm in diameter.7 If a dog has a relatively light burden of 12 worms—six males and six females—that is still a large mass of worms in the pulmonary arteries.
The disease is one of chronicity caused by the worms interacting with the surface of the pulmonary vessels.8 The presence of the worms in the bloodstream also leads to the physical rupture of red blood cells and the deposition of hemoglobin within fixed macrophages of the lungs, making the lungs of dogs with chronic heartworm infections appear brown. Villous proliferations on the vessels also lead to the formation of small thrombi that are carried deeper into the lungs and ultimately induce chronic lung disease.
But keep in mind that even with therapy, the worms are in the pulmonary arteries, not the intestinal tract. All that can happen after arsenical therapy is that the worms are driven deep into the lungs where they die in tightly coiled bundles, decay, and are ultimately cleared by the host's cellular response. However, this takes a long time and is not without effects; remember, each dead worm is about 20 cm long. But there is no good reason for dogs to receive preventives all year; it is just not needed.
THE WEATHER
Don't forget to factor in the unpredictability of nature. We know that Culex tarsalis mosquitoes can live up to two months when temperatures hold at 77 F,9 but there is a good chance they can live longer at cooler temperatures. Near George Lake in Alberta, Canada, over half of the overwintering Culex territans female mosquitoes studied survived more than 138 days at 23 F.10 These mosquitoes will continue to seek blood meals every time they are about to lay eggs, and if they are infected with heartworms in October, they could still easily transmit the infection during an unseasonably warm December, like the one we experienced this winter in Ithaca, N.Y. Such microclimate situations put dogs at risk all year long and are part of the rationale that led to the recommendation in the capc guidelines that dogs receive preventives year-round. With locally acquired heartworm transmission likely occurring in every state, it seems there is no good reason for a dog to be at risk in a nice November or in a warm March. But there is no good reason for dogs to receive preventives all year; it is just not needed.
THE PRECEDENT
Perhaps we could take a lesson from our counterparts in human medicine. Human lymphatic filariasis, a disease caused by cousins of the heartworm, is transmitted by mosquitoes that bite infected people. The disease induced—elephantiasis—is horrible. Small thread-like worms live in the lymphatics and cause severe disfiguring and immobilizing disease in their human hosts. The World Health Organization is leading the charge to eradicate these parasites through "mass drug administration strategies for disease elimination."10 These mass treatments of populations have had a significant impact on the rate of infection in people and vectors.11 We can only hope that someday we will place similar pressure on the transmission of heartworms, reducing the occurrence of the devastating disease that heartworms cause in dogs.
Dwight D. Bowman, MS, PhD, is a professor of parasitology at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, College of Veterinary Medicine, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853.
REFERENCES
1. Heartgard Plus. Heartworms are a serious threat. Available at: heartgard.us.merial.com/whyheartgard/why_problemareas.asp.
2. National Cancer Institute. Cancer Trends Progress Report—2005 Update. Available at: http://progressreport.cancer.gov/|~h...ncer.gov/.
3. Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry. Available at: www.atsdr.cdc.gov.
4. Immiticide product insert. Duluth, Ga: Merial Limited.
5. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Arsenic in drinking water. Available at: www.epa.gov/safewater/arsenic/index.html.
6. Rawlings CA, Losonsky JM, Schaub RG, et al. Postadulticide changes in Dirofilaria immitis-infected Beagles. Am J Vet Res 1983;44:8-15.
7. Levine ND. Nematode parasites of domestic animals and of man. Minneapolis, Minn: Burgess Publishing Company.
8. Munnell JF, Weldon JS, Lewis RE, et al. Intimal lesions of the pulmonary artery in dogs with experimental dirofilariasis. Am J Vet Res 1980;41:1108-1112.
9. Mahmood F, Reisen WK, Chiles RE, et al. Western equine encephalomyelitis virus infection affects the life table characteristics of Culex tarsalis (Diptera: Culicidae). J Med Entomol 2004;41:982-986.
10. Hudson JE. Cold hardiness of some adult mosquitoes in central Alberta. Can J Zool 1978;56:1697-1709.
11. World Health Organization. Lymphatic filariasis. Tropical disease research: progress 2003-2004. Seventeenth Programme Report of the UNICEF/UNDP/World Bank/WHO Special Programme for Research & Training in Tropical Diseases, 2005.
I included the references since I filched this off a web mag I subscribe to.
So tell me, how many of you keep your dog (and/or cats) on year long prevention for heartworms?
I do. I do because my own ex-MIL's dog got heartworms not once but twice because she stopped the pills in December and by June (it took 6 months for us to see them back then, before occult infection testing was invented) we found heartworms in her again. I do because I have seen dogs come in and collapse and die agonizing deaths with end-stage heartworm infections. I do because I helped remove the heart of a boxer that was so full of worms they were crawling out into the adjacent branches of the heart vying for room. I do because I have seen tearful owners carry in cats that were DOA because that is the common presentation for cats with this terrible, 100% preventable disease.
I do because my Cameo was full of them before I got her. We had to treat her twice for them before she was clear and healthy.
I do because I love my pets.
What do you do?
(I know the last one is gross to most of you- but I have seen much worse)
The Visit, The ending...
Well I didn't see my daughter for three days after she left to go pick up her bf and then stayed at a former instructors house. (He was both of our English instructor for many classes.) They adore her and she watches their beautiful son so that's where she was until Sunday when they came over and then we all went to lunch. My only niece came over from Oakhurst with her two girls and her fiance. It's a two hour drive over the windiest roads we have, so that was a big deal.
It was Jemma's 22 birthday too! I didn't get to be with her on her 21st, which was very sad, but we made up for it a week afterward last year. This time, my son was there also.
They don't get along great but someday I hope they will find a way to mend the fence.
We had lunch at a local Chinese/Japanese restaurant and then came back to my place to say our goodbyes and take some pictures. Jemma and Brett went back to the Toners and then left sometime Monday morning, the first day back to work for me after break. She started back to Humboldt a week later.
So here we all are:
The whole family and Brett on the right:
Sky, my niece Carree, Josh in back, Jemma, Brett and in front front right to left, Hunter and Torree.
My son Josh:
Josh, Jemma and her bf Brett:
Brett- he is a great guy! I truly hope she hangs on to this one.
None of me since I was behind the camera which is a very good thing!
So that was it. I kept back the flood of tears when she left. It all ended well. I miss her terribly but she calls me a lot which is really great. She is doing a lot of cooking and wants my recipes, so I have to invent them since I cook by rote and not by recipe.
I am just grateful she is so conscious about her health and eating habits. She is much better than I was at that age. Speaking of age, she is now the age I was when I moved to Tuolumne County, 32 yrs ago. Wow. Time flies eh?
Well happy Weekend everyone!!
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