Tag Archives: anxiety

Rogue Update 03-05-09

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I have a little ranting to do…and a little raving too. Bear with me. LOL I got ahold of Dr. Overall and she agreed that it would be appropriate to add amitriptyline to Rogue’s daily meds at this point since we haven’t seen progress with the fluoxitine alone. I spoke with the vet here in Salt Lake today shared her recommendations, and he agreed to call in the prescription.

Here is my rave. The vet in Salt Lake asked me if I’d considered working with a trainer to help Rogue. I’m grateful that I have a vet who obviously realizes that Rogue’s issues need to be addressed by not only medication, but also through training. I wholeheartedly agree that behavior modification is vital. I would never think that medication alone is the answer. I feel very privileged that we found Dr. Overall through Leslie McDevitt and that she has given us protocols of behavioral modification to work through in addition to her recommendations for medication.

However, here’s my rant. I think I literally bristled a little when he made that comment. Long before I decided to go down this avenue of seeking anti-anxiety medication for Rogue, I had been working with her to modify her behavior. I thought that I’d explained what we’ve done with Rogue prior to coming to him. In fact, I think that anyone who knows Rogue…knows the amount of time and effort we’ve put into training. Granted, in hindsight not all the training that we did was helpful. In fact I think some backfired, but I did what I hoped would help. Bleh, I don’t know, it just struck me like he thought that I hadn’t tried any training before. Whatever, that’s my rant for the day!

So…here’s the latest. We’ll start her out adding 10 mg. of Amitriptyline once a day for 10 days and then go to 10 mg. twice daily. I’ll keep everyone posted if we see any changes. Keep hoping for the best… :-)

Character Flaws

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We don’t seem to making any headway with our work to lessen Rogue’s anxiety or reactivity, even though we’ve adjusted her meds. To recap: 7 weeks of fluoxitine at 1mg dosage which was an error (fortunately on the safe side). Then we changed it to 10mg of fluoxitine daily for two weeks, which made her more aggressive towards the other dogs, and now we are closing in on 5 more weeks at 5 mg. daily. We’ll re-evaluate again at the first of March.

Frustration and impatience. Those two words would describe how I’ve felt about this process with Rogue lately. Well, and then guilt. Probably those three would sum it up. They usually come in that order too. I’ve been reading and re-reading the consult and protocols that we got from Dr. Overall, and this phrase always gets me, “these are the dogs who show you the type of person you can – but never expected – to become.”

When I first read that statement I thought, “yep, living with Rogue will reveal good qualities about us that we didn’t know we had.” How egotistical! LOL What I overlooked was that it was going to reveal many more negative qualities about myself than positive ones as her stress and anxiety wears on me. As we work through this process, I’m beginning to think that it’s more about being willing to see the flaws in your character and being willing to work to overcome them, to become a better person. Just my thoughts for today….

Can We Start Over?

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Today is one of those days that you just wish you could have a do-over! I just hate it when a week gets off to a bad start, it’s hard to recover.

First we just got word that one of our friends had to say goodbye to their 14 year old Malinois this morning. He was just one of those dogs that was bigger than life. Even though he was 14, you just kind of expected that he was always going to be around. He had one of those personalities that you just can’t put into words! It would all just be an understatement when it came to him. His passing is just an incredible loss to everyone who had the privilege to know him. :-(

Then I got a call from my husband that they are cutting everyone’s hours back at work. I’m still keeping in mind how fortunate we are to still be employed, but it’s scary…

The Trip is Cancelled!

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I’ve known for the last month that our trip to North Carolina with Zoe to compete in the AKC Nationals was not looking good. My husband came home the first part of January from work and told me that it was so slow that they were considering lay-offs. Being the perpetual optimist that he is, he wasn’t ready to cancel the trip. He wanted to wait till Feb. to see if things had picked up, as there was still a small possibility of things working out. So, I put off posting about this till we made a final decision. As the month wore on, the lay-offs became a reality for some of the employees, including a very good friend of ours. :-( It wasn’t till last week that my husband finally said: “It doesn’t look very good for our trip to Nationals…” then he finished by saying: “but, it’s only Wednesday!” LOL

February is now here and we’ve made the decision to cancel the trip. It seems that for the moment his job is still “secure”, although I don’t think any jobs are secure these days. The problem is that with the lay-offs they need all the remaining employees to be able to step up “if” more work comes in, and so taking a two week vacation is just not possible right now. :-(

I’d be lying to say that I’m not incredibly disappointed! I kind of felt like this was a once in a lifetime shot to compete with one of my dogs at a National level…but life goes on.

Rogue Update 01-19-09

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So, we’ve lowered the dosage of Fluoxitine back down to 5 mg. per day now, and the good news is that at this dosage, she seems to have settled back into her normal self. That’s not to say that she’s not anxious, but at least she’s not sitting there with her teeth chattering and she’s not going after all the dogs to instigate a fight. :-) I think we’ll keep her at this dosage for another month or month and a half and see how she’s doing.

With the warmer temperatures the last week or so, the snow is melting on the ATV trails that we hike on, so it’s a muddy mess now. Not fun to walk in, or to try to brush out of 7 long haired dogs. I hope it either dries out soon, or freezes back up so we can get back into our routine.
I don’t like snow, but at least it’s still easy enough to walk in. On the bright side…the snow is gone in the yard, and we’re back down to the grass, so we can play in the yard a bit now! Woohoo!

Rogue Update 01-15-09

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O.K. So Rogue has been getting the higher dosage of 10 mg. per day of Fluoxitine for nearly two weeks now. I wish I had better news to report, but I don’t. Instead both my husband and I have noticed that she is getting more anxious and reactive instead of less. :-( She has also been acting more aggressive towards the other dogs in the house, not just targeting Zoe. We haven’t had any altercations, (thank goodness!) but I think that’s due in part to the fact that the other dogs just can’t figure out what in the world she is doing. They just look at her like: “What is wrong with you?, and What do you think you’re doing?”

I am battling with my impatience to see progress vs. what I know is a long process to find appropriate medication and dosage and be able to work through the behavioral modification protocols that we’ve been given. Sometimes I worry that my impatience will taint my observations, but when my husband asked me to call the vet to discuss this, I decided that it wasn’t just me seeing negative changes in Rogue.

I contacted the vet in SL today and voiced my concerns and we both agreed that we should back the dosage down to 5 mg. per day and observe her behavior at that level. I also emailed Dr. Overall to get her opinion of what we’re seeing. I’m sure that with her experience she’ll be able to tell me if this was the right decision. Wish us well!

Rogue Update 01-02-08

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I’ve decided that sometimes all you can do is shake your head and laugh when things don’t go as planned. As you know, we started Rogue on fluoxitine and alprazolam 7 weeks ago. Well, I wasn’t seeing much improvement in her reactivity and so I contacted Dr. Overall again to update her and see if we needed to make adjustments in her dosage or in the medication itself, or if this was just typical.

Well, come to find out that the dosage that we’ve been giving her of 1 mg. daily of the fluoxitine was wrong. Turns out that was a typo and we should have been giving her at least 5 mg. daily, if not 10 mg. So, after I found that out, I tried to contact the vet here and he’s out of town till next Tuesday. Ughh! At the prompting of my friends at Sheltie Rescue I called the vet’s office again and asked if one of the other atttending vets would consider changing the dosage of the prescription, so that we don’t have to wait till next week. Fortunately, they were nice enough to do that for us, and we’ve picked up the new dosage today.

I’m trying to look at this as a really long ramp-up time on the meds, instead of just viewing the last 7 weeks as being wasted, but I’m only partly convinced. LOL Hopefully in the coming weeks we will have some progress to report. I hope!!! :-)

One Week Today

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It’s one week today that Rogue has been on the Fluoxitine. Overall, I haven’t noticed much difference. But , there have been some small things that I have noticed, it’s just not consistently. Every once in a while, Rogue will be watching me, but it’s not with the hard intense stare, it’s a little softer. I would love to see that expression more often! :-)

The other thing that I’m really happy with is that sometimes she seems to be doing a little better with Zoe. Once my husband even remarked that she had walked up to Zoe and then turned around and walked away. I know that may not sound like much, but for Rogue that’s progress. I really hope that as she feels less anxiety that the tension between them lessens too!

I also tried the Alprazolam this Monday. I was taking Twist and Raven down to Parowan to go herding for the last time this year, and thought that I’d take Rogue along just for the trip, not to herd. I gave her 1/2 a tablet two hours before we got there, but when I got her out of the car, she was just as anxious as she always is. I can think of a couple of reasons for this. In the consult it said that I should repeat the 1/2 tablet again a half an hour before the anticipated event, and I forgot to bring the tablets. (The meds can’t work if you don’t remember to bring them along to give to her.) The other thing could be that the 1/2 tablet was the low dosage, and she said that we may need to experiment with that to see what she needs. So…I got some good information to work with if nothing else. I was hoping to try this again this Thurs. when Raven and Zoe’s agility class is scheduled, but it got cancelled.

So, that’s about it for the first week…

Rogue Update 11-15-08

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I’ve been really bad about keeping up on posting lately. Alot has been going on, but I’ll try to recap this last week.

I was hoping to hear from our vet in Salt Lake on Tues., after he got back from vacation, but unfortunately, I never did. I called the office again on Wed. and then promptly missed his return call because I my silly phone on vibrate and didn’t hear it! (Could’ve screamed when I figured out what I’d done). LOL Called the office again, hoping that he hadn’t already gotten busy with other clients, but I was too late. I made one more attempt on Wed. to get ahold of him, but he was just getting ready to leave for a housecall and didn’t have time to talk to me then either. Ughh! So, we set up an appointment for 8:00 am on Thurs. Finally, success! We talked about the fax consult for Rogue and he agreed to call in the prescriptions for her! Woohoo!!!

So, we are now two days into the new medication. She is on 1 mg. of fluoxitine a day. I haven’t noticed any changes yet, but I didn’t really expect any this soon anyway, and at least she’s not having any negative reaction to the medication. At the first of next week I’ll try the alprazolam too and moniter her reaction to it. I need to give it to her when I can watch and see how she responds, so that I figure out what dosage will be best for her. For right now we are going to use the fluoxitine daily and the alprazolam as a preventative, (like prior to an anticipated event that might be stressful), or interventional help, (like a storm beginning while we’re not at home).

In the meantime, we are also continuing to work on the Relaxation Protocols that we had been doing before, and we are also working on some other protocols, one being the Protocol for Deference. It is designed to help the dog learn to be calm, learn that they can ask questions of people and learn that they can get guidance about what is expected or what will happen…if they just sit calmly and provide themselves with the ability to take in useful information. This is a huge change from how Rogue has been up to this point. She is definitely seeking information, but I’ve never provided a really clear way for her to get it. I really think that this is something that all my dogs and myself are really going to benefit from.

I also decided that I wanted to try to keep a video diary of how this whole process is going. I decided to video Rogue doing her Relaxation Protocols, (so it may not be the most interesting video for most people to watch) LOL, but I chose it because it should allow me to make a comparison of how she is able to relax in a structure that she is familiar with before and now that she is on medication.

PS to “Today is a good day!”

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I just wanted to add to that last post, I didn’t mean to make it sound like I was ready to jump off a cliff or something. LOL Everyone’s comments are so kind and I really appreciate the support. That initial negative emotion that I had was I think more a result of being overwhelmed, tired, and anxious about this for so long. It was quickly replaced by a real feeling of hope. I really meant it when I said that Saturday was a good day!I feel like we’re finally on the right track. It’s a huge relief!