Resq TailsThe trials and triumphs of rescued dogs

This post is more to help me sort out what I need to get done today than anything. I need to bathe both Zoe and Dare this morning. Dremel nails too. I have to boarders being dropped off this morning. Then I need to go back up to my friend’s house and finish helping her clean in preparation for everyone coming in over the weekend to pick up their puppies. I hadn’t planned on a second trip up there, but we just didn’t get as much done yesterday as I had hoped. Had to break into the cleaning time to take the puppies on a little short road trip to see how they handled that experience. They did great by the way! Here’s a couple pictures of the cuties.

I better stop while I’m ahead. I’ll just keep posting more and more cute puppy pictures if I don’t stop now. Anyway, after I get done up there today, I need to come back home, pack up the car for the DOCNA trial tomorrow. I wish I could say I was looking forward to it more than I am, but I think the busy week is taking it’s toll. I’m going to need to go to some Outer Banks vacation homes to recover after it’s all over. LOL Actually, I can’t say I’m not looking forward to running agility tomorrow…it’s that I’m going with a friend that doesn’t want to drive to Salt Lake tonight, so we are going to have to leave here at 4:30 am tomorrow. Plus it’s supposed to snow again. Do we all sense a theme here? Whenever I need to drive to Salt Lake, it snows. Bleh. Anyway, hopefully the roads are good for us, and I’ll have lots of fun stuff to report when we get back.

The thaw continues. Woohoo! Well, except for the mud part. Hopefully a few more days of this and it will start to dry out a bit. Maybe then I can even consider bathing everybody. Till it dries up though, that would be a total waste of time. They just seem to have a never ending ability to find the muddy parts of the yard. There is enough lawn showing through the snow that I couldn’t resist hauling the jump outside today for Layla’s one jump work. The problem was that with all the mud around the edges of the grass, I kept slipping and couldn’t keep up with her to be in the right spot for the run by part of the jump around the clock drill. So, no video for today. Maybe in another day or so it will be better conditions out there.

My husband went out for an interview for a job yesterday. It’s not really an ideal job, but it’s a job. He thinks that the interview went ok, but of course them more time he has to think about it, the more he’s questioning himself. Bleh. Hate how the mind works sometimes! I guess they will be calling for second interviews on Monday, so we’ll know more then. Monday he also has another interview. So, at least there are some possibilities. The other fortunate thing is that we are not in need of any bad credit credit cards. In fact, we don’t have anything on credit cards so that’s a big relief right now.

The other thing that we are tossing around is the possibility of me taking some online courses to get certified to be able to do medical coding and billing. We have a couple friends that have done it and it seems to be a field that is growing right now. So, I am going to be talking to them a bit more in detail about what is involved and the chances that I would be able to find employment working from home once I finished the courses. I don’t have much choice in that regard, since someone needs to be here to run the boarding kennel too.

Anyway, just a little glimpse of what is running through my head right now.

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…

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….

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.

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!!!