Life With A Senior Pet

                                   Monday  6/30/2014

We had been battling digestive problems with Mallery for about a month. I had made many meals of beef and rice, and froze ice cube trays of it, to keep it fresh. (She's a very little eater). She would get better for a week and then her problems would resume. Then I made turkey and rice and froze it in ice cube tray servings, thinking the beef was too greasy. She would get better then after a week she would digress. After 4  to 5 times of this episodic dilemma, I finally gave in and took her to the vet. We left the vet with a $180 bill and 12 can's of special wet dog food and antibiotics. The vet took an x-ray to see if she had some kind of mass. Luckily no mass, and they just confirm the collapsed trachea I told them she had. I have been feeding her the wet dog food now for awhile. Because she never eats wet dog food, she would just look at it and bark. (Mallery does not like change- you know she is 68 years old and old dogs like old people hate change). I finally had to roll the wet dog food in balls and hand feed her. After a few bites, she got her courage to eat the balls out of her bowl.

On this day I took a picture of sun rays through the clouds.

Mallery let us know that a storm was on the way, way before we could hear anything. She ran around the Nest with her radar ears on straight up.

Then she started her panting and ran under the table, as well as having her radar ears up. This summer we have noticed that she is walking really really slow. The vet says it is probably because of the lack oxygen. Her trachea is very narrow now more in her chest as well as her neck area. I asked about having her cataracts removed, but I found out it would cost around $3000 for both eyes. So I guess we will keep the bed rails up instead. At the end of the bed we have a blanket stretched from bed rail to bed rail and tucked under the bed. (If you didn't read previous blogs, we do this because Mallery has fallen out of bed several times because of her cataracts, giving her night blindness). Twice now I have woke up hearing her whining. The first time, I could not find her anywhere, as I frantically searched and called her name. I finally found her down at the bottom of the stretched blanket. We really don't know how she gets down there. Because she likes to sleep at our feet, I am thinking Joe kicks his legs and she get pushed off the end of the bed and into the the blanket. As Joe say's, "well the blanket is doing what we want it to do".

After the storm went through, we had a nice sunset, so I took Mallery out for a picture.

There are always people on the beach looking for Petoskey Stones. If you have never heard of Petoskey Stones, which we had not either until we visited Petoskey, MI last year, here is a link about them  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petoskey_stone

We put an offer on a house, and if everything goes good on the inspection, I will tell you more about our new home in a few weeks.