Our Miss Priss Has Gone To Be With Oreo..

I had not expected to write this for many years, Miss Priss left us far to soon.....Shortly after New Years both Miss Priss, and Burley Dog  had all the goodies that go with big Christmas and New Years dinners.  They had to much rich food and went off the Eukanuba.Why would any sane dog eat dog chow with so much delicious Turkey and such floating about?  The truth is, all of that has become a rather painful blur, and doing an emotional post mortem on a much loved pet seems useless, but try we have.......Burley Dog started eating again normally about 3 days after he realized the goodies were gone, Miss Priss just nibbled.  That said, Miss Priss always " just nibbled, she was a very dainty eater. Near the end of January she threw up a bit of bile, and we took her straight to the vet, she had lost a couple of pounds.  The vet thought it was a little upset from to many treats and put her on a anti-nausea pill.. great pill.  Ceneria, it's $15 dollars a pill and Miss Priss was on it for three courses of treatment. During that time she went on antibiotics in case the rich food had given her intestinal bacteria a tumble.  Miss Priss continued to slide down hill. I have lost track of what came next, I think blood work and fecals, all normal.  Everything about our little girlydog was normal, she just would not eat.
I began spoon feeding her a gruel of Chicken breast, rice, and one boiled egg.  It went through the Cuisinart until it could go  through an infa-feeder device. We got what we could down her, and hoped it would stimulate her appetite, it didn't We did a full body ultra-sound, all normal, and with each " normal" our hopes would raise, as we ruled out the bad guys......... we thought.  We continued the infa-feeder and Miss Priss continued to be anorexic, we thought " my God, our baby is going to die of nothing"..and in a very real sense she did.....I just got further than I thought I would without going to pieces.........
Next our search went for any blockages we could have missed in the ultra-sound, and we did x-rays and barium, all clear, everything went through on time and fully digested, blood work had ruled out so many things, as had the complete ( including occult blood ) fecal.  She was not bleeding anywhere internally or in stool or vomit.  She continued to drink and urinate normally which seemed to rule out Cushings...
We don't use any poisons, and neither of our dogs had any interest in any pieces of rabbit a hawk might drop flying over the yard.Her heart was excellent as were all other organs, so we made an appointment with a specialist from California who comes to Reno once a week.  On the morning of that appointment , which was at 1 pm, Miss Priss just collapsed, it seemed instantaneous.  She had spent the morning sleeping in the front hall, nothing unusual there except she wasn't on her back, Newfies tend to sleep on their back when all is well in their world.  All was not well in our Prissy's world...At noon we got her up to go to the vet for prep, shave that little precious tummy one more time.......she stood up, her eyes went back in her head and she fell over.  Her gums were pure white and we  lifted her in the van and rushed her to the vet.
Her blood count had gone from 45 which is normal to 12 which is fatal.. Five vets had worked on this girl for 4 weeks and we were no closer to the truth than when we started.  Sometimes God hears our prayers, but the answer is no......Subcutaneous fluids were not an option it would dilute the remaining blood cells and kill her. We considered a full transfusion, but for what? Transfusions are hard on the system to.Her condition was stable, heart was good, all organs were functioning, but she was dying form lack of red blood cells, and we had no idea why they were not there.  The only ways to explain that type of drop are internal bleeding, and there was no blood in her intestines or her abdominal cavity on examination, she had not thrown up or passed any bloody stools..... That left us with two, and only two scenarios, either her immune system had gone wild and attacked her own system, or her bone marrow had stopped making red blood cells..
Neither was treatable.  We could have put her through more treatment and tried to suppress her immune system with steroids, but what if we were wrong and it was the bone marrow that failed.............?
It seemed unfair and cruel to put her through more treatment with no hope of recovery .  Even if the steroids had held the monster at bay, she would have had no immune system and died from something else pretty shortly.  Thank you for your outpourings of love and I am sorry it's taken me so long to answer your questions......
We did get another puppy, her name is Silkie, and is the exact opposite of our Miss Priss, but she is wonderful, and w love her, but Miss Priss will always be our highest joy and deepest low.

I Moved Chap's Blog Over Here

Many of Chap's readers have asked to have his blog remain open, his family was not comfortable with that. None of them are bloggers and a blog that denies comments is really a waste of every one's time.  I changed his picture a bit and actually got a little closer to the complexity of the man than I did in the original.  Chap was a man of deep passion, an intensity that he put to good use in his prison work.  He was a kind man, but he was not one to be tampered with, I like to think he is still hangin' out watching the action; waiting to make one of his rather acerbic comments that used to drive us up the wall..It's a little hard for me to write without thinking of him, and Kev says the same thing.  It's not that we didn't have free thought, we often disagreed, but the hammering out of ideas was key to all of us.
I have never had two blogs, nor had I ever tried to merge them, so this has been quite an experience for me.  I hope I didn't mess up to badly.  I will delete No Kill No Way now that this is done, as the family requested. Apparently his blog incorporated into this one by date, and for you Chap fans, his is easy to find because he didn't like the pictures.  I did try to make a little thing called " Chap's Corner" but that didn't turn out to well, blogger wanted to do it by date so we did it by bloggers rules.
I used to say Tom was a man of the cloth in steel toed boots, and that is what it will take to wear this vicious No Kill beast to the ground.
For the love of Chap,
Forward Ho