Oh yes it is... here I am!! Oye, what a month it has been. On May 10th, we were able to bring Blitz home. It is so much fun having him here with us - and a LOT of work. Luckily, he took to sleeping in the kennel at night really well, and after a week and a half was sleeping thru the night with no potty breaks like a champ. Housebreaking has been another issue. At this point, there are really no accidents any more, but for the first two weeks I wondered if there really was a light at the end of the tunnel and at what point I should buy stock in Bounty.
When he had been with us for 2 weeks we took him to the vet for his second round of shots, we got him microchipped, spoke to the vet about when we could sign him up for the snip-snip, and casually mentioned that he drinks A LOT of water. Like he would drain his bowl and then keep licking it and licking it. Since I've never had a larger type breed before, I didn't know if it was normal or not, but thought that it was just more of a nuisance because since he was constantly guzzling water, it was hard to gage when he would need to be taken out which resulted in lots 'o pee everywhere. Well, five hundred dollars later, we walked out of the vets office rather shell shocked.
No, the vet informed us, excessive water drinking is NOT normal, so a barrage of tests was done on him, and a lot of the possibilities as to what the diagnosis could be looked pretty grim. It could be something just as simple as a UTI or he just absolutely loves water. Or it could be his kidneys were not formed correctly so his body tells him to drink as much water as possible to help them flush things out. But they really can't do anything to test that until he's full grown and they do an ultrasound. If that were indeed the case, ultimately his lifespan would be shortened and there would be no cure. Or, it could possibly be diabetes lipidus. If that were the case, it would mean that his brain was not creating enough of a certain hormone that concentrates urine, and was always sending the message to his body to constantly drink more. There is medicine for that, but it could range anywhere $3-7 a day for the medicine for the rest of his life. So until we heard back from the vets office with some results, they wanted us to record how many cups of water a day we gave him to see just what his intake was.
The conversation that Joe and I had that night was not a fun one. Basically Joe said, we had to figure out where the $$$ line was that we were not willing to cross. Could we really afford to provide the best life for him, if in fact Blitz had an illness? The very painful answer, was no. It broke my heart to think about having to find another home for the little fluff ball that I had become very attached to. He was MY DOG. I cried like a 5 year old. We decided that we would wait to hear from the vet before making any decisions. Luckily, it seems that his blood work and urine samples all showed good levels of whatever they were looking for, although thru charting his water intake he does drink not quite double what a puppy of his size and weight should. So, the vet wanted to do a trial run on the diabetes meds for about a month. If his water intake were to decrease while on the meds, then we would know that it is in fact diabetes, if no difference, then no diabetes, and he's just a water lovin' hound. I am pleased to report that so far a week on the meds, and no difference. YES!!! Things are looking up, and at this point, we know that he'll be with us for many years.
So that's the latest with Blitz... that doesn't even include me slicing my hand open at work while cutting an avocado for my sandwich at work, me getting in a fender bender in our new car, Joe getting an a car accident at work (he's fine), saying good-bye to Joe's brother who decided to go to Australia for a year. Whew. That's a lot. But that doesn't mean that I haven't had time to look at all your blogs, just because I've been so negligent of my own. This lady? I love her whole site. I love learning about how she does her photography, and I've already cooked several of her recipes. And her and her? Well, they're inspiring.
The desk for the office has been ordered, so hopefully after that the new computer will not be far behind. That will make blogging and uploading photos SO much easier - getting to use the laptop only when Joe is sleeping is hard because there's 42 other things I should be doing. Whoever said sharing is fun was a liar. I'm ready for my own space!!
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