Bob bob bobbing along...
Bob continues a medical mystery. I had booked him in for an MRI scan next week. When I discussed the booking with Rude Craig the vet last Friday, he suggested starting Bob on Previcox as a painkiller. He'd previously been on Metacam, but he went off his food, so I took him off that in case it was upsetting him. But then his hips seemed to start hurting him. Previcox is supposed to be easier on the stomach, so Craig suggested that instead.
This week, Bob has given up crawling and has not had a screaming attack once. Is it the Previcox? Is it coincidence? Is he recovering? Who knows! I called Tina the vet nurse who had done the scan referral and gave her the latest. The scan & referral to a neurologist will cost £1100 plus, which is a fair old sum for a small charity, so I wanted to be sure that if he had the scan during a period when he wasn't experiencing the problem, we weren't likely to get an inconclusive result and need to go back for another one. She conferred with Craig, and of course, they couldn't tell me one way or the other.
In the absence of certainty, we decided to give it two weeks and see if Bob continues to improve. They don't want to neuter or vaccinate him until we know a bit more about this, so it is a good thing that he has now sorted out which is inside and outside and is clean in the house, and is a sweetnatured boy who doesnt' want to hump everything.
He has, again, gone off his food, but this time round, this seems to mostly amount to not wanting to eat kibble, which although an unusual view for a dog to take, is kind of understandable from the human perspective. He will still happily eat wet dog food, meat, eggs and porridge, so I'm going to try keeping him on that for a bit and see if I can get his weight up a bit.
In the photo of my Mum feeding the dogs treats you can see the size of him compared to Mollydog (28kg) and Az (23.5Kg). I think he should be closer to Mollydog than Az, but he was 25Kg when he came here, and only 26.5Kg when he had his Xray. I'd really like him to be around 29, as he's a lot heavier built with thicker legs than Molls, and his big chunky ribcage falls away alarmingly at the waist.
I took some sighthound running pics of my hounds running with two lurchers and a greyhound belonging to some friends and popped them on Flickr for ease of sharing. I don't normally use Flickr, but I wanted to put these up at a reasonable printable size and that seemed a quick way to do it...
They are here : http://www.flickr.com/photos/50739438@N02/sets/72157625699319843/
Bob is not in them. He doesn't really do competitive running : the best he can summon up is a sort of brief gallumph. I think he enjoys it though.
This is the first set of photos I've taken off my new huge fast SD card (can't quite believe that 8Gb of data now fits on something that size*) . It is so huge and fast that the SD card reader built into philmophlegm's monitor could not cope, and refused to talk to it, so I bought a really cheap USB SD card reader off amazon.
Why did I not buy one of these before??? It's LOADS faster than the old card reader and the machine doesnt' have any tendency to throw a wobbly if you want to look at the pics without copying them first! It cost less than three quid! AWESOME.
* I've selfconsciously put this in in the hope that in a few years I will look back on it, probably using my grain-of-rice-sized supercomputer, and laugh...**
** damn it, I've just jinxed computer development for the next 30 years and possibly caused the downfall of industrial civilisation with that footnote, havent' I? I can only hope this second footnote will fix things.
This week, Bob has given up crawling and has not had a screaming attack once. Is it the Previcox? Is it coincidence? Is he recovering? Who knows! I called Tina the vet nurse who had done the scan referral and gave her the latest. The scan & referral to a neurologist will cost £1100 plus, which is a fair old sum for a small charity, so I wanted to be sure that if he had the scan during a period when he wasn't experiencing the problem, we weren't likely to get an inconclusive result and need to go back for another one. She conferred with Craig, and of course, they couldn't tell me one way or the other.
In the absence of certainty, we decided to give it two weeks and see if Bob continues to improve. They don't want to neuter or vaccinate him until we know a bit more about this, so it is a good thing that he has now sorted out which is inside and outside and is clean in the house, and is a sweetnatured boy who doesnt' want to hump everything.
He has, again, gone off his food, but this time round, this seems to mostly amount to not wanting to eat kibble, which although an unusual view for a dog to take, is kind of understandable from the human perspective. He will still happily eat wet dog food, meat, eggs and porridge, so I'm going to try keeping him on that for a bit and see if I can get his weight up a bit.
In the photo of my Mum feeding the dogs treats you can see the size of him compared to Mollydog (28kg) and Az (23.5Kg). I think he should be closer to Mollydog than Az, but he was 25Kg when he came here, and only 26.5Kg when he had his Xray. I'd really like him to be around 29, as he's a lot heavier built with thicker legs than Molls, and his big chunky ribcage falls away alarmingly at the waist.
I took some sighthound running pics of my hounds running with two lurchers and a greyhound belonging to some friends and popped them on Flickr for ease of sharing. I don't normally use Flickr, but I wanted to put these up at a reasonable printable size and that seemed a quick way to do it...
They are here : http://www.flickr.com/photos/50739438@N02/sets/72157625699319843/
Bob is not in them. He doesn't really do competitive running : the best he can summon up is a sort of brief gallumph. I think he enjoys it though.
This is the first set of photos I've taken off my new huge fast SD card (can't quite believe that 8Gb of data now fits on something that size*) . It is so huge and fast that the SD card reader built into philmophlegm's monitor could not cope, and refused to talk to it, so I bought a really cheap USB SD card reader off amazon.
Why did I not buy one of these before??? It's LOADS faster than the old card reader and the machine doesnt' have any tendency to throw a wobbly if you want to look at the pics without copying them first! It cost less than three quid! AWESOME.
* I've selfconsciously put this in in the hope that in a few years I will look back on it, probably using my grain-of-rice-sized supercomputer, and laugh...**
** damn it, I've just jinxed computer development for the next 30 years and possibly caused the downfall of industrial civilisation with that footnote, havent' I? I can only hope this second footnote will fix things.