Dog News

Ugh. So as we all know, Kirby Sweetheart has numerous medical problems. The most troubling right now is an inflammatory disease which may or may not be GME (if you look up encephalitis in dogs, you'll find it. There's a reason no one calls it by its full name). This is what is suspected to have caused his little "can't walk" problem last fall. Since then, we've been going in every six weeks for a chemotherapy treatment called CCNU (I don't know what that is either). It suppresses his immune system in an effort to calm the inflammation that gives him so much trouble, so we have to get blood work done regularly to make sure he hasn't got an infection. The treatments have been more or less working. He's always walked funny, and now he just loses his balance on the rear end more frequently than he used to.

Only last week he started limping on his front legs. We went through another round of very expensive tests and the latest is that this is probably is progression of the inflammation and, since it manifested while he was in treatment, it means the CCNU isn't working as well as it used to.

There's a lot of uncertainty in all of this. GME is progressive and usually/eventually fatal. I've known this for six months or so, but he's been doing so well that it has been easy to pretend that this is just another one of his chronic problems and it's perfectly manageable. He's getting to be an old dog, and he could be even older than we think since we don't know where he came from. Right now we're going to switch to more frequent treatments and when that stops working, there are other drugs we can try, and so forth.

He's happy and doesn't seem to be suffering at all. However, the bottom line is Kirby is getting worse. This is real.

My immediate coping strategy is to eat everything in the house that's remotely appealing. Maybe I'll snap at Mr. D over something meaningless and maybe I'll look to see if there are any cigarettes in the drawer. I hope to have a better plan for tomorrow.