Beagle Update

Komrade Kirbsky continues to show no signs of his earlier troubles. He has had his visit with the neurologist. She officially proclaims his event to have been a "seizure." She also found a deficit in his blinking reflex that we never noticed (or went looking for) before. He is getting an MRI soon and he is taking an anti-convulsive medicine. She warned us that it sometimes upsets doggie stomachs, so when he barfed once, we were a little concerned, but we decided to wait and see if it was a one-off. Then he barfed again, and now we find that we are back to this:

When we first adopted Kirby about two years ago, he came complete with about 10-12 of these little chunks of rigid plastic that he proceeded to yak up one or two at a time over the course of several weeks. It looks to us like a plastic ball of some sort, complete with fake stitching. We thought we had seen the last of these a long long long time ago. We were wrong. Whatever else may have happened to our little buddy before he came to live with us, I'm pretty sure that no one force-fed him a plastic football. This one is his own fault. Still, what's going on in there that he could keep this in his stomach for two years? I suppose it isn't small enough to pass into his intestines. Yuck. I truly hope this one is the last one. And we are going to chalk up the recent spewage to his special gift and not to his new medicine, until we have reason to suspect otherwise.

By the way, let's say you are having a rough weekend and you decide to take a long afternoon nap in the bed. You are wearing your pink bathrobe, and you are cuddling with Kirby under the covers. Then you wake up and you decide to take a shower. Because you are lazy, you toss the robe on the floor. Because he is devoted to you, this is what Kirby does while you are in the shower instead of staying in bed:

Awwwwwww

Also, we decided to discontinue Kirby's special hypoallergenic diet because we convinced ourselves that we didn't see much of a difference. He was still engaging in ritualistic paw-licking at certain times of the day. If we didn't notice a change when we put him on it, we certainly noticed a difference when we took him off it. Within a few days, he was not only doing the paw-licking (which we have decided has a habitual, compulsive element to it), he was also back to the possessed-by-the-devil paw chewing and the frenetic butt-scootching (sometimes he drags himself in a straight line, and sometimes he goes in a circle) with a vengeance. THAT behavior, we concluded, certainly had diminished a lot on the no-itch diet. So we are back to it.

Last but not least, the Yarn Bandit has a new color-coded harness. Kirby liked too much to chew on the clasp of the old one, and it wasn't opening and closing well anymore. Here's his updated look:

Oops! Too slow, Bunny. OK, let's try again:

Good boy, Tiki.