Random Trivia

courtesy of icanhascheezburger.com



I’ve met some interesting people and seen some interesting things in the 22 years I’ve been working in veterinary practices. A lot of them are too short to justify a whole blog entry, so I decided to put a few into a trivia-style blog. Some things are just too strange to not pass along…

1. I once broke into a vet clinic when I was a teenager… to walk the dogs on a Thanksgiving morning. I didn’t have a key, and the person who had the key and was supposed to help me was over an hour late. I had to scale a wall to access the door to the kennels. All the dogs got their Thanksgiving treats, and I got home in time for Thanksgiving Lunch with my family. And my co-worker?  She showed up just as I was walking the last dog.

2. I worked at a clinic that had one of America’s few female serial killers as a client. Her name was Audrey Marie Hilley, and she was from Anniston, Alabama. Her nickname was The Black Widow. She even bounced a check at the clinic. They didn’t pursue her for payment… I wonder why… If you want to know more about her, Wiki has a pretty good article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Marie_Hilley

3. Have you ever ultrasounded a llama to see if it was pregnant while it spat on you repeatedly in protest?  I have.

4. Scared Straight: I have seen one rabid animal. It was a bat found climbing up a screen door to someone’s back porch in the middle of the day.  I didn’t take the appropriate precautions for my personal safety when I sent the sample to the State for testing. This was a bad decision on my part, because I wound up having to list myself as a “potentially exposed” individual with the State of Alabama Department of Public Health. That led to a significant amount of paperwork.  I was 17 years old.  I’ve never taken a potentially rabid animal lightly since.

5. Just after Branchville Animal Hospital opened, I had a very nice lady bring me a snake to identify. It was in her basement, and she and a neighbor had captured it in a 20-ounce drink bottle. You should have seen her face when I told her it was poisonous. I have no idea how they got it into the bottle without getting bitten.

6. My worst on-the-job injury was a bite not from a dog or a cat, but from a gerbil named Zippy.  It was awful and I might have to write a whole blog about it later.

If any of you guys want to hear more about the incidents I wrote about this time, drop me a line and let me know. Thanks, everybody, and have a safe Halloween!

-RAB

Current Events - October 2011

I decided to postpone the promised horse blog to do a “current events” blog. It’s been an unusual week around here… pretty memorable.

Monday of this week, I neutered a rat. Yes, a pet rat. It was something I’ve never done before, and wouldn’t have agreed to it except that:

1. A staffer here asked me to do it, and
2. We had a sincere but brief conversation about anesthetic risk with small rodents a few days before I did it (I also made her promise not to tell her daughter about the new pet rat until after the surgery & recovery).

We have the benefit of having a couple of techs on staff that have had some experience dealing with more unusual pets. One of them ran anesthesia for me while I did the surgery as fast as possible to get Dudley awake ASAP. It went off without a hitch, but I have to admit I was sweating bullets the whole time.

On Tuesday, someone “donated” an injured bird to us. As best we can figure, it’s a Rail of some sort- a spindly-legged marsh bird. It was addled at first, and was therefore easy to deal with. As we fed it and it came back to its senses, it began to act like you would expect any wild creature to act: It tried to kill the people working with it. Thank goodness, its abilities in that area are somewhat limited by the fact that it weighs about 2 ounces. Here’s a picture of him before he turned into the avian version of The Incredible Hulk:

After almost a full day of rehab here at the clinic, the bird is destined for a local wildlife rescue group.  I think he’ll enjoy having a new group of folks to thrash.

Finally, we took in some boarders yesterday that are a little out of the norm for us. Here’s a picture of the crew:

I have to say that I think this is fun. I grew up on a poultry farm with tens of thousands of chickens at a time, so eight is a different ballgame entirely. They’ll be with us until next week until their owners get back into town. Until then, I’ll be entertained by the occasional “peep” mixed in with the barking from the kennels.

I’ve talked before about not knowing exactly what you’ll be doing every morning when you go into work as a veterinarian. This week has proven that variety is the spice of life- it’s been a blast.

-RAB

Queenie and the Highway 5 Incident

courtesy of icanhascheezburger.com

Q: “Do you work on horses, too?”

A: “No, ma’am, I don’t.”

It’s a question I get asked frequently by clients when they meet me for the first time. The next couple of blogs will tell the stories that could be considered stepping stones on my path to writing horses off as a species I would deal with professionally:

When I was a kid, I would go to my grandparents’ house every summer for a week or so.  My brother and I would spend time with them, and usually my cousins as well, in one of the most rural settings Alabama has to offer. Through my young eyes, it was a magical time. The days were filled with exploring the woods, fishing, fireworks, shuffleboard at the community club, and swimming.  And then there was the horse.

Her name was Queenie, and her expressionless brown eyes hid the cold flames of her hatred for children.

I’ll spare you the details of the times that she would step on my bare feet and attempt to grind me into the ground (“I’m sure she didn’t mean to!”, the adults would say.  Riiiight.) No, we’ll go straight into The Highway 5 Incident.  I was about 7 years old at the time.

My grandfather wanted all of us grandkids to grow up riding horses.  I never had the desire, really, but was cajoled into riding double behind an older cousin.  I knew that my grandfather had been riding Queenie to keep her used to the concept and this made me a little more comfortable.  Before I agreed to get on, I watched my cousin ride her solo.

So, what could go wrong?  Almost everything.

My cousin and I together probably weighed about 150 lbs., which was far less than what Queenie was used to when she carried my granddad.  As my grandfather let go the reins and turned control over to my cousin, things were going well.  The plan was to take a slow ride down the roadside in front of the house, on the flat packed surface made from dirt and gravel from the nearby Cahaba River.

The “slow ride” portion lasted for about 10 seconds. That’s when the “hang-on-for-dear-life” part began.

Queenie picked up speed, first getting up to a trot, then deciding to go faster. As my adult family members watched us speed away, my cousin tried to regain control with what appeared to be a pretty fair level of skill for someone about 10 years old. It may have actually been desperation seasoned with a little bit of panic, but from my vantage point, it looked like skill. These are the kinds of observations one makes when one is a second grader on the back of a horse that has just decided to go off the reservation.

[I was probably suffering from what a psychologist would call a case of Normalcy Bias, or maybe just Denial.  My child’s mind was trying to convince me that everything was going to go back to normal, and everything was going to be just fine. Well, it wasn’t.]

 After about 100 yards, Queenie put on the brakes, and then reared up. This threw my cousin off… which was trouble for me in two ways.  First, it meant that there was nobody was holding the reins.  Second, as you will remember, she had been sitting in front of me.  When she fell off, she went backwards. This knocked me flat on my back while still sitting on the horse.  I was gripping with my legs, unable to sit back up.  Queenie had started trotting again, heading away from my Grandparents’ house and toward the biggest local road- Highway 5. I was still onboard, and with each stride she took, my back slapped against the top of her rump while I held a death grip with my legs.

Even as I struggled to get upright, I knew that it was never going to happen.  I was getting jostled too hard to ever overcome it.  It was at this moment that I accepted my fate.

 It had been a short life, but a good one, I said to myself. Then, I released my grip on Queenie’s flanks and waited for whatever would happen next.

I discovered that freefall is an interesting, peaceful sensation in the few heartbeats it took for me to reach the ground. I hit flat on my back, which knocked the wind out of me. Normally, this would have been a bad thing, but I was so grateful to be off the horse that I simply didn’t care. Slamming into hard-packed river gravel never felt so good.

My only worry at this point was that Queenie was going to double back to try to finish the job she had started- maybe stomping me into paste while I struggled to get up - but she didn’t. She did, however, make it to Highway 5 before my grandfather could catch her and get her back to the barn.

So, my cousin and I survived. I’ll never forget what my uncle (a towering, mischievous, mustachioed man) said to me later. As we sat on the front porch of my grandparents’ house, he barely hid a smile. “You mean to tell me you just let go? Why didn’t you hold on? It seemed like you had things under control to me.”

Later, I wondered why Queenie chose the course of action she did that day. She had never thrown anyone off before. The only conclusion I could come to is that she had been biding her time, waiting for an opportunity to eliminate two kids at once. Despite the fact that she tried to end me, I had to admire her cunning and patience in the pursuit of her targets.

More horse stories next time-

-RAB

I am NOT Batman

You don’t have to be a veterinarian to have odd things drop in on you from the animal kingdom. Last night, for example, we had an event.

My wife and I had put the kids to bed and were enjoying some peanut butter crackers and a DVD. It was getting late, so when the door opening chime sounded, we were immediately alarmed and started looking for an intruder. What we found instead was a sleepwalking child who had opened the front door on his way to parts unknown. We didn’t know that this was going to shape the rest of our evening when we got him back into bed.

 A few minutes later, my wife and I were back into the TV show when she looked to her right and said “Huh. There’s a bird in the house.” I looked over at her just in time to see her expression change from curiosity to horror. “It’s a bat! A Bat! THERE’S A BAT IN THE HOUSE!”

I don’t dislike bats. They eat mosquitoes, which I do dislike, and therefore I consider us allies. The only problem with this truce is that the only rabid animal I’ve ever dealt with was a bat. That’s a hard thing to forget when you wife has just informed you that one has invaded your domicile.

I stood up from the couch to find the bat and figure out how to solve this problem. As it turns out, I didn’t have to worry about finding it. As I turned, the bat nearly flew into my face. I spun to get out of the way, spraying my peanut butter crackers all over the living room. I may or may not have screamed at this point. There’s no video of the incident, and wives cannot be forced to testify against their husbands in a court of law.

Speaking of my wife- she was on her feet by this point. It looked like she was somewhere between fight and flight.  The bat was turning tight circles, flapping noiselessly around my living room, and he was moving fast.  I was afraid to stand and get in the flight path again, so I sort of low-crawled into the next room and stood up.  Again, this was a mistake.  After orbiting the living room for 10 or 15 laps, he shot by me again and made a hard turn, flying through the open door of my youngest child’s bedroom.  I had crouched again and didn’t see him, but I saw his shadow tracing a path on the wall of the bedroom with the help of a night light.

My problems had just gotten worse.  I now had a wild animal in my child’s bedroom.  One of my cats had headed for the hills amid the shuffling of frantic humans and a UFO whirling over its head (it was later recovered under the bed at the other end of the house).  My other cat is blind, and therefore had no idea what was happening or which way to run to get away from it all. He was frantically trying to get somewhere -anywhere- else, and I tripped over him trying to get to the bedroom and shoo the bat out.

My wife had collected herself and gone for a broom while this was happening.  She also found the presence of mind to remember that I am vaccinated for rabies, which she made sure to yell over her shoulder.  That, in addition to the Y chromosome, made me the go-to guy for bat eviction.  Lucky me.

I opened the front door to try to give the creature an escape route, and started towards my child’s bedroom.  My wife called out for me to tell her where the bat was, as we were separated at this point in the riot.  “It’s in the bedr-“ was all I could get out before it winged by me again. I whirled around to see where it went, and it came back at me.  I hit the deck this time, flat on my stomach, as the bat lapped the room about 2 feet above my head.

It was at this point, lying flat on my stomach in my dining room with a winged rodent circling above me, that I realized I was being made a fool.  There was nothing I could do, however, because I couldn’t stand up without getting in the flight path of the whirling, potentially rabid beast about the same size as a gerbil.  My wife yelled again from the other room to see where the bat was.  I replied, without thinking, "He's got me pinned down!", as if the bat was doing strafing runs.  I was still on the floor, craning my neck to see which way he was going next, when he flew through the kitchen and to my bedroom. This took him past my wife, who saw him fly straight into the master bathroom.

He had flown into a room that was smaller than his turn radius. This was the only thing that gave us the upper hand. When I reached the room, he was on the floor, addled, behind the garbage can after having flown into the wall. When I came close, I heard him for the first time- he was looking at me and (probably) swearing in a high pitched, growling, metallic-clicking voice. After an aborted attempt to catch him using a mop bucket and a cutting board, he crawled into a crack between our bathroom cabinet and the floor.  Now he was out of sight and totally inaccessible.  We had no choice but to wait him out.

We blocked the crack at the bottom of our bathroom door with some Western novels we had bought for my Dad- it was the best thing we could find to block it in- and went to sleep.  At 4:30AM, my wife woke me up saying that she heard him scratching around in the bathroom.  We checked the room and found nothing.  We assumed he was still tucked away near the cabinet, so we went back to sleep making sure to keep the bathroom sealed tight.  When I left for work a few hours later, there was still no sign of him.

When I came home for lunch, I noticed that the bathroom door was open and the brooms (our weapon of choice) had been put away.  I asked my wife what happened.  She had kept the bathroom door shut for most of the morning, but she decided to do a more thorough search.  She was turning the bathroom upside down when she eventually found the creature hiding between a shirt and a pair of pants hanging on a hook on the bathroom door. Think about that when you get dressed tomorrow morning….

Then came the part that I wish I could have seen: she opened a door to the outside, then snagged the clothes and folded them over the bat to trap it. She went to the edge of the woods behind the house and set it free. She even had the presence of mind to take pictures of the release:

She is justifiably proud of herself. Her final statement on the matter was "I conquered a bat".

It was an interesting incident, to say the least. In closing, I would like to say three things:

1.       Be careful with bats. They may be cool, but they can carry rabies.

2.       If you have a child that sleepwalks, barricade them in their room every night. It's the only way to be sure that they don’t let bats into your house.

3.       My wife played a big part in this story. She is also the person who polishes the blog after a couple of drafts. She's a tremendous help... most of the time. There are exceptions.  Below is a paragraph that she wrote for inclusion in the blog that was "scrapped" in the editorial process. I'll let you read it and decide for yourselves whether or not it should have been included:

"I must say… my wife is super cool for facing down the bat alone.  Sure she’s bigger, stronger, and smarter than the beast, but bats are just plain freaky.  My wife is quite possibly the most awesome woman in the world."

-RAB

One Week On Call

He looks well rested... must be his first night back on call.

Emergency work is part of what we do at Branchville Animal Hospital. We do it on a limited basis only, for several different reasons.  The on-call doctor stays plenty busy when they’ve got the phone.  How busy, you ask?  Well, it’s really unpredictable.  I have spent a full week on call without the telephone ringing (but that hasn’t happened in the last year or so).  On the flip side, I vividly remember my busiest emergency call day ever: I got 11 emergency phone calls between 7:30AM and Noon one Sunday.

The odds are that within our client base, something is bound to happen outside office hours.  I figured that I’d do one blog as a chronicle of what happens during a random week on call.  This blog is being written as the calls happen, and I’ll cover follow-up  care for those cases….. wish me luck.

Monday: My first day back on call. My associate takes the phone every other weekend- sharing coverage gives us both a chance to spend time with our families.  Just one call tonight- a depressed mastiff mix puppy that the owner suspected might have parvo.  She was correct.  Parvo, if you’re not familiar with it, is a devastating disease of puppies that is frequently fatal.  It’s a viral infection that usually kills via dehydration and secondary infection.  To treat the puppy, I placed an I.V. catheter and started antibiotics and antinausea medications.  I set the puppy up with a round of fluids dosed by a constant rate infusion pump.  The pump would ensure that the puppy would receive 50 milliliters per hour of I.V. fluids throughout the night to help prevent dehydration. If there’s an unsung hero in parvo treatment, it’s whoever invented the fluid pump.

Tuesday:  one HBC at about 6:30PM. “HBC” is veterinary shorthand for “Hit By Car”.  This dog was hit in the face and was hurting.  It had a broken jaw (it was difficult to determine the severity at this point) and what I suspected was a significantly bruised lung when I listened through my stethoscope.  We elected to stabilize for the night, get it out of pain, and deal with the jaw the next morning.  I’m cautious about diving into surgery to treat major trauma at night when I’m working solo. Trauma patients can be unstable under anesthesia. That’s the kind of thing you want to take on when there are plenty of other folks in the building to come running if you scream for help.  And yes, I’ll admit it…. I’ve had to swallow my pride and yell for help before.  It doesn’t even hurt my ego to think about it anymore.   Well, at least not as much as it used to.

Wednesday: Once the clinic opened, we started sorting out the jaw damage from the HBC incident.  We sedated the dog for X-rays and further diagnosis.  At BAH, we have the ability to wire jaw fractures back together if the fracture occurs in about the first 2/3 of the length of the jaw.  If the fracture is further back than that, then it gets beyond our expertise and surgical equipment and we refer out to a specialist. Well, this dog had it all: 2 fractures in the front of the jaw, and one fracture so far back that I knew better than to go after it.  Did you know that Birmingham has one of only 19 certified veterinary dental specialists in the nation?  We referred the case to him with an appointment made for Thursday.

On a different note, the parvo puppy from Monday started to turn the corner on Wednesday.  I was getting a little more optimistic about his chances.  No after hours calls, but I still had to go back to the clinic late that night to check on this little guy.

Thursday: one call. The case was disturbing enough that I feel that it might be better not to write about it.  Some things are best forgotten.

On the upside, Monday’s parvo case was looking a lot better, and Tuesday’s HBC dog got its jaw fixed by the specialist.

Friday: Cat fight with eye injuries:  An owner came home to find that their cat had returned from some sort of misadventure with a swollen eye. The eye looked pretty odd on physical exam, because the membranes around the eye were so enlarged that the eyeball itself was completely covered by puffy, pink tissue.  I could tell that it hadn’t been that way for long. I sedated the cat and found that some of the membranes were actually stuck to an abrasion on the eyeball.  I separated that, checked the eye again, and treated it with a painkiller and antibiotics.  Although it may sound odd, it is actually a very common type of injury.

The parvo puppy from Monday was doing well enough to go home Friday as well, feeling much better. Score one for the fluid pump.

Saturday: A good day.  We heard from Tuesday’s HBC dog, and it was back at home after being treated by the specialist. The cat with the eye injury went home looking better.  The cat’s owner even brought me a chicken biscuit for (second) breakfast as a thank you for seeing him the night before.  She had no idea how grateful I was for this.  We hosted a tour and Q+A session with a local Girl Scout troop just after we closed for business so there was no time for lunch in between.  The biscuit came in handy.  As an added bonus, the Girl Scouts gave me Thin Mint cookies (my favorite) as a thank-you for the tour, so I ate well.  Thanks, everybody!

Saturday night, I got a call from a family that was pet sitting a dog with a long-term illness.  The dog was not doing well. She had been diagnosed with cancer several months ago, but has had more than adequate quality of life up until now.  Things were changing now.  During the day, she had started having seizures, indicating that the tumor had likely reached the brain. I talked to the petsitter, but stopped short of taking any action until I could talk to the owner. The owners called me a few minutes later and we discussed what they wanted us to do.  They were coming back into town in less than 24 hours, and they really wanted to see their pet again before they had to say goodbye.  I understood.  The dog had been their companion for more than a decade. We settled on giving her a medication to eliminate any pain she was feeling and to stop the seizures.  I hoped we could buy enough time to get them back into town to see her one last time.

Sunday: I started off the morning following up with a case from Saturday.  I had run bloodwork on a sick dog during regular business hours on Saturday; the results were back from the lab Sunday morning.  The kidney values were worse than I expected.  I called the owner at about 8 AM, and things had not gone well overnight at home.  We brought that pet in for treatment early Sunday afternoon.  I also took a call to arrange for the cremation of an elderly cat that had passed away peacefully during the night.  While I was at the clinic handling bloodwork and the cremation request, another family made the decision to let a pet go that was suffering from rapidly progressive heart disease.

Mid-afternoon, I got a call from a lady who had taken over care for a VERY elderly dog after his owner had passed away.  He was having a rough time and had become dehydrated, had some vomiting troubles, and would not eat or drink. I could see that he had lost a significant amount of weight since I last saw him.  He was running a fever of 104, which explained a lot. We gave him a fever reducer and half a liter of fluids.  We talked about antibiotics and decided to give him some time to see what happens.  Given some other recent developments with him, it seems likely that he may have cancer. At his age, cancer is a tough diagnosis.  If we do wind up losing him, I will say this: he has had a long life, and a good one.

So there it is, one week on call at Branchville Animal Hospital. Emergency work isn’t the most cheerful part of what we do- if anybody’s calling you after the clinic closes, then something has gone wrong.  But thankfully, that’s just a small part of what veterinary medicine is to me.  Inside normal operating hours, I did routine surgeries, gave puppy shots, joked with clients, and wrestled with kittens.  There are certainly worse jobs out there to be had... I’m happy with mine. 



The Kindness of Strangers

a small part of the supplies donated

It’s been almost two months since the storms of late April that caused so much damage and loss of life in our area. Immediately after the storms passed, there were a group of people that stepped up to the plate and helped out local pets and their owners in different ways. Their kindness deserves some recognition, and I’d like to thank them publicly in this blog.

Right after the storms, we got busy fast. We took in a lot of boarders from storm-damaged homes and a few animals that had become injured by falling trees and flying objects. It was clients, not us, who came up with the idea of collecting supplies to send to harder-hit areas.  Good hearted people saw a way to contribute, and they made a difference. We had a few people come in within a day or two of the storm, but when we put a notice about being a collection point on the sign outside the clinic, the rate of donations really picked up.

The first things to come in were the basics- lots of food, cat litter, some water- all the things you would expect. Before it was over, I would guess that we took in about a thousand pounds of pet food. We also got a significant amount of treats, toys, carriers, and other sundry items as well.  We sent it to a few different places. The majority of what was donated went to the Shoal Creek area via the Animal Shelter of Pell City and St. Clair County Animal Control. Some of the supplies went to Pleasant Grove via a buddy of mine who was doing work there at a distribution center.

Other clients knew that there would be needs outside the norm, and wanted to find a way to supply those as well. They asked if we would accept cash to help any animals that needed it. We established a benevolence fund with the money.

The very next day, a sick dog came in from the Shoal Creek area. He needed care, and his owner was trying to get back on his feet- his house had been destroyed, and he had been able to salvage very little. The money donated to the benevolence fund made it possible to get treatment underway for the medical issues the pup had and the surgery he needed. Serendipity is a wonderful thing- the solution arrived at the clinic before the problem did.

So, to everybody who made a contribution- Thank you, on behalf of everyone helped out by what you gave. You made some dark days a little bit brighter.

-RAB

Scully, the World's Greatest Dog

Scully, April 2011

Scully was one of the first dogs we ever saw after we opened, back in 2005.

My professors in school would have described her as an Alabama Red Dog… her parentage would best be described as “undeterminable”, but that didn’t matter much. She was laid-back and sociable. We liked her because she was easy to work with, and she was a great companion. After a few visits, she usually pulled her owner, Mr. Pete, through the door so she could check out what was going on in the lobby when they arrived.

She had a fairly normal medical history for a long time- ear infections, skin allergies, and the little things that happen from time to time when you’re a dog.

In 2007, things began to get unusual for her. She came to the clinic one day with profound pain in her pelvis and legs. She wasn’t the only one hurting. You could see it in Mr. Pete’s eyes- he was upset to see her in pain.

We spent the next few weeks trying, with better success on some days than others, to control her symptoms. We took an X-ray of her lower back and found that she had some disc spaces that were abnormal. Due to extra bone formation between her last vertebra and her pelvis, a condition called lubosacral stenosis was high on the list of probable causes for her trouble. The hallmark sign of this disease is simply pain in the hips and legs, and Scully had it in spades. As the abnormal bone growth progresses, the space left for the spinal nerves to occupy shrinks. This puts pressure on the nerves that can gradually increase over time.

We spent the next two years fighting bouts of pain periodically, with Mr. Pete as her advocate, trying different combinations of medications to allow her to live a comfortable life. I’m happy to say that over time, her symptoms have subsided to a great degree. I won’t tell you that I know for sure why that is, but I would guess that the disease stopped progressing and her body compensated for the problem. She needed less medication as the years went by, and she needed our help less frequently.

Last year, we got a phone call that we weren’t expecting. Mr. Pete, Scully’s best friend and the person who made sure she didn’t hurt, had passed away. I still remember reading his obituary in the local paper. It listed his survivors as his wife and daughter, as well as "the world’s greatest dog, Scully”.

From that day on, Mr. Pete’s daughter took over Scully’s care. Scully continued on the same path as before with only occasional problems until August of last year. Scully's Mom scheduled an appointment for us to check out some lumps that had appeared. We didn’t think much of it at the time; Scully was hitting middle age and lumps are a fairly normal thing. What we found when she got to the clinic made my heart sink. Every lymph node in her body was several times the size it should have been. There are very few diseases that can do that to a dog. I talked to Scully’s Mom about sending off some samples to a lab to find out what it was, hoping that I was wrong about what I believed it was going to be. We collected samples from several of the swollen nodes, and sent Scully home with a promise to call as soon as we got the results back. I went to my office to do my medical notes for the day. When I pulled up her file, I typed this into her chart and hung my head:

8-6-10: Enlarged lymph nodes full-body, sent off samples for cytology. Suspect lymphoma.

-RAB

When the biopsy came back a few days later, it confirmed lymphoma.

Lymphoma is one of the few types of cancer that I consider to be treatable in the general practice environment that most veterinarians, including myself, work in. Scully’s family elected to try chemotherapy, and I was glad. We’ve been through two rounds of chemotherapy with her so far, and are into a maintenance phase at the moment.

Chemo for Scully usually consists of placing an I.V. catheter and giving drugs though it, as well as giving medications by mouth. She has been a real trooper. Through most of the treatment, things have been uneventful. Early in the first round of treatment, she became severely ill and would not eat.  I was not expecting this, because I’ve never seen a dog treated for lymphoma have side effects of that nature. We had to postpone treatment for a little while, but we resumed it and she has been doing great since. She’s had no nausea or any other significant side effects since late August of last year. Her quality of life (the one thing that determines whether or not chemotherapy is worthwhile in my mind) has been excellent. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have continued.

Now we see Scully every few weeks for treatment. She comes into the lobby looking for treats. Every time she finishes the I.V. portion of her meds, we open a fresh can of dog food. She sits on the table waiting for us to toss a piece into the air and she snaps it up when it comes close. Here’s a picture of her in action:

This picture shows the hallmarks of true excellence in tossed food catching.

In the picture, only the head is blurred by motion. The lower body is stock still, providing the solid platform a professional food catcher needs to perform at their best. Note the blurred area right next to her mouth- it’s canned food in flight. For those of you keeping score at home, Scully’s current record for consecutive catches stands at 7.

In the spirit of full disclosure, we don't know what the future holds for Scully.  Her cancer could stop responding to medication, or she could go into remission. For now, things are good- she's having no side effects from treatment. She feels just as good as she did before she developed cancer. We'll keep giving her treats as long as she cares to eat them. It makes her happy, and it makes us happy, too.

-RAB