Fall Bullets

First of all, does anyone want to purchase some delicious fruit and for a good cause?!  If so, go to, and I kid you not, www.yummybandfruit.com and then click on the button that says ship to anywhere in the continental US.  When you place your order, please choose “Lily Hunter” (my niece!) from the “Choose Seller” menu.  Yum!  You know you like to get fruit nestled in a crate.

I tend to get USA healthcare rage, and this tendency was only augmented the other day when suffering a bad sinus infection, I called my doctor to get antibiotics, and was told that she had to see me first, and then that her first available appointment was in the second week of December.  Keep up the good work, USA!  If only we had the same healthcare plan as our senators and representatives….

Martha came to visit a few weekends ago!  I haven’t been in a writing mood so have not yet recorded the visit on my blog (although Martha did so on her blog here).  For unknown reasons, Owen called Martha “Apple” and enjoyed bossing Apple around on Friday night.  On Saturday poor Owen came down with the First Nursery School Illness of 2014 (an illness with which I am still afflicted, sigh), so was feeling poorly all day.  But we did go to a playground and he had a good time swinging with his auntie.  Since she left, Owen has asked about Apple frequently.  The other day he asked me if Apple poops.

Owen is liking his nursery school and didn’t cry when Susan dropped him off on Thursday.  He brought home this lovely picture he made using fall leaves:

Owen talks A. Lot. these days.  He will chatter throughout dinner, not letting Sean or me get a word in edgewise.  He likes to point out what we are all having to eat and drink (Mommy wawa, Daddy beah, O milk), and then he likes to point to what’s on our plate and ask if he can “hold it”?  Not that I believe in the communal plate (and have indeed been known to use my fork as a weapon if someone reaches towards my plate when it has dessert on it), but since Owen doesn’t eat much variety, I’ve been letting him “hold it” and take a few bites of whatever it is.  

Owen will gladly tell you, if you ask, that Posy (Popey) likes cupcakes, Plum (Pum) likes o-gurt from a finger, and Dorothy (Dorty now, and no longer Dorr Dorr) likes a hamburger.  Yesterday Owen asked for candy corn in a cup for dinner, and had a tantrum when we said, um, no.

If Owen is mad at us, he will tell us bye bye.  Bye bye Mommy or bye bye Daddy means, please leave the room; you are dismissed.  Little tyrant.

Here he is playing with the Peppa Pig dollhouse he got from Susan and his grandmother:

Dorothy had her last laser treatment the other day.  We are still restricting her movement to try to give both of her knees more time to heal.  She actually doesn’t seem to mind spending most of her day lying on her back on the couch.

Slander!

Owen’s been getting up at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning and calling the night a day, so to speak.  This is very much not okay, and I absolutely refuse to let him get up before 5:15, and even that time makes me grumpy.  6:15 is a much more civilized time to get out of bed, if you ask me.  Anyway, after getting up in the wee small hours of the morning, Owen is often tired throughout the day (hello consequence).  Here he is pretending to sleep during music class.

Dorothy's Other Knee

Poor Dorothy injured her other back knee on Friday, and we are all feeling rather glum about it.  When Susan informed us that Dorothy was limping again, I figured she had re-injured her back right knee, but when I tried to help her over to her dinner dish that night, I realized it was the back left that she was holding up.

Luckily, our vet has late hours on Friday and we were able to get an appointment with the doctor who had treated Dorothy’s right knee.  It seems that she tore her left knee, after over-using it while the right one was healing.  She was more or less on bedrest all weekend and we are taking her leashed into the front yard to do her business, instead of letting her out by herself in the back.

It is all rather discouraging:  first, I feel sorry for Dorothy, a dog who loves to run and jump and wrestle.  But I also worry about the cyclical nature of the injuries – it seems to me that she could easily keep damaging the knee which is hurt the less at the time, and where does it end?  At the moment she is on an anti-inflammatory medicine and we are taking her for laser treatments, which are not cheap.  There’s a surgery that could be done, but outrageous cost aside ($5,000), she could have the surgery, recover, and then tear the knee again while barking at the mailman, so it doesn’t seem like the way to go, even if we could afford it.

Dorothy is thin and fit for a bulldogge, and is only 3 ½, so these ailments are surprising.  Ah well!  At the moment we are taking it one day at a time and seeing how the recovery goes.  I plan to perhaps call and ask the doctor a few more questions too, like can a dog wear a knee brace?  Should she not go up and down the stairs or onto her sleeping couch?

Poor Dorothy!

Feeling sorry for herself in her new bed:

Dorothy Gets Lasered

Last summer when we were in Maine, Dorothy overdid it a bit chasing tennis balls across my parents’ back lawn.  This is both an endearing and exasperating quality of Dorothy’s:  when it comes to physical activity, she goes all out.  She can’t just trot across a yard, or even trot quickly: she has to do a sprint, and the sprint has to be as if her life depended on it.  So when Dorothy runs, her front legs are always behind her back legs and vice versa.  And when Dorothy jumps, she has to jump and twist.

Dorothy last summer in Maine, taking a brief pause:

So when we were in Maine last summer and she had all that acreage in which to run around, she had to run around every inch of it and speedily at that.  By the evenings, she’d be passed out in a bed, and when she would get up we noticed she was a bit stiff and then limping.  We had her take it easy when she returned to Philly, and after a few days she was back to normal.  But a few months later, she was limping again, and this limp kept recurring.  It would appear after some strenuous activity, but then go away on its own.  We did notice that each time it came back, it left for less of a time than previously, and finally we decided to take her to the vet.

On Saturday the vet was pretty sure that Dorothy had a knee injury in her back right leg, probably a torn ligament or a partially torn ligament.  They put her on an anti-inflamatory medication and also gave her a three-minute laser treatment to make the knee feel better and activate the cells into healing themselves.

I did notice a difference on Sunday and Monday, although the problem soon became that since the leg was feeling better, then Dorothy wanted to return to her normal activities, and we were trying to keep her sedentary.  We took her on short walks around the block instead of letting her out in the yard, so that she wouldn’t run, and Sean put a temporary hold on their daily wrestling sessions.

Then yesterday when I got home from work, her leg was even worse.  Whereas before she would step down but not completely put her heel on the ground, now she was trying not to put that foot down at all.  Oh dear and bother.  It is all very stressful!  I want Dorothy to be able to be healthy and active, but we can’t afford the thousands of dollars that surgery would cost.  Plus I have this vision of going ahead with the surgery somehow, and then Dorothy running across the lawn after recovery and pulling the ligament again. 

This morning she seemed a little better—she was walking more normally although still not putting her foot all the way down.  Other than that, she seems her normal self—she is not at all acting like she is in pain, other than the limp that we see.  So we shall take it day by day and see what happens.  She was supposed to have another laser treatment today, but our car is acting sulky so we had to cancel; hopefully we will be able to make it to Saturday’s laser appointment.

Heal, Dorothy!