Doctors Don’t Know Everything

Drugs are not always necessary. Belief in recovery always is. ~Norman Cousins, American journalist

Dallas here.

It’s been a ruff summer.

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Sometime in late winter, somebody (who shall remain unnamed!) dribbled a little in the living room, and when Mama found it, I got the blame.

Huh!

So she took me to my dogtur, who did a bunch of tests and determined I have early stage kidney disease.

Disease? Me?

No way.

Well, Mama went to the Interwebs and learned kidney disease is pretty common in senior pups.

And we can live with it for years, providing changes are made in foods and such.

Mama didn’t believe it. She was certain I wasn’t long for this world.

She did a LOT of crying. And trying to hide it from me. And then she went out of town with her sister, dumping me in the kennel and instructing them to transition me to the yucky kidney food.

I think she thought she’d get back home and find me gone.

Well, I lost five pounds because I wouldn’t eat that slop, but I was still alive.

They moved me to another brand of kidney food, but I refused to eat that either.

I wasn’t getting any of the good stuff — no cookies, pizza, donuts.

Nothing.

So I slept all day. If you can’t eat, and your Mama pins a pitying stare on you, I figured maybe this really was the end.

Mama had my dogtur do another blood test and this one came back perfectly normal!

Then Mama talked it over with my breeder, who said I was too good a pup to treat like that. She said, “He thinks he’s being punished, and he doesn’t know what he did.”

Mama took me back to the dogtur and told her that, if I had to go to the Rainbow Bridge, she wasn’t going to send me there starving.

Go Mama!

She put me back on the food I was eating before all this fiasco, started giving me cookies and other treats, and would you believe — I’m practically back to being Dallas once more!

I’ve gained much of my lost weight back, I play ball with Mama every day, I’ve taken little walkies, and Mama says I have the spark of life again.

Take that, kidneys!

Note: Debbie here. This is not medical advice, okay? Part of me questions whether his initial diagnosis was accurate. I just know that both Dallas and I firmly believe you live until you die, and quality trumps quantity any day.