Update: so, that was a week

Okay, so I did get various things done this past week — I now have one and a half chapters to go for Sekaran, unless I change my mind, plus probably an epilogue, so as you see, I’m getting there. Might have a complete draft by August 1, not sure, I guess we’ll see.

Plus, I’m doing proofreading corrections and tweaking for Eight Doors, of course, so that’s moving toward completion.

However, I also had a somewhat distracting time last week because Ish had recently developed a problem that I thought was a UTI but — this won’t surprise any veterinarians who read this; Hi, Camille — to involve the prostate instead.

Anara Call Me Ishmael RN RA RE, as a young dog

Ish is eleven and a half, not what I would call old, but not a youngster either. He’s a beautiful dog with an amazingly mellow, relaxed temperament about life. He didn’t love performance as much as my Pippa, so I stopped showing him in Rally a long time ago, although he made me look good and we did go through the Rally Excellent title, which is quite demanding. Astonishingly, I don’t find a lot of YouTube videos showing rally performances, so here’s a site where someone shows a decent performance in RE with a Chesapeake Bay Retriever. Visualize the whole thing happening at twice the speed because Cavaliers are a lot faster in these small courses than this Chessie. Actually, the second demo video with the light-boned Golden is a lot closer to what I’d call a normal pace.

Anyway, so, Ish is having a complicated time right now. With an intact older male who suddenly shows signs LIKE a UTI, but it isn’t a UTI, the choices are (a) prostate cancer, which is, it turns out, a fairly dire prognosis for dogs; or (b) benign hyperplasia, where you neuter the dog and wait for the problem to resolve, as it eventually will, though not as fast as you might like.

So on Monday, I ran up to St L for an emergency appointment at Veterinary Radiology Associates, which is a FANTASTIC practice and ALL the emergency services in the country should take notes on how VRA runs their practice and do it JUST LIKE THAT.

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So, side note: Veterinary Specialty Services, I am looking straight at you and pointing out that your staff radiate contempt for your clients, fail to return calls, do not appear to care a whole lot about the pets they see, and overall your practice is roughly one thousand times less pleasant to interact with in every possible way, plus I don’t trust your doctors. I used to, but now I don’t, and there are reasons for that. Given a choice, anybody in the St L region should absolutely go somewhere else, and where should they go if they need any kind of radiology? They should go to VRA, that’s where, which is about a mile away from VSS, it turns out.

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Anyway, my vet told me VRA would be great and they would work me in on Monday for an emergency appointment and therefore we could go ahead and schedule a neuter at the earliest possible opportunity, which was Wednesday, and then if Ish turned out not to have prostate cancer, we could neuter him and move on. My vet did not come right out and say directly, “And I don’t think this is cancer,” but this was pretty clearly her guess.

And my vet was right: this looks like benign hyperplasia, BUT, the specialist at VRA said, “However, I am seeing multiple lesions in the small intestine, and my best guess is this is some kind of cancer, but it could be irritable bowel syndrome. If you would want to do chemo, you should do exploratory surgery and biopsy a lesion and maybe remove one of the larger questionable areas; if you would not want to do chemo, then my recommendation is don’t do the exploratory surgery at all, handle symptoms if and when they appear, and have me look again in five months.” And what HE did not come right out and say directly was, “And in my opinion, chemo would more likely not lead to any great outcome,” but again, this was fairly clear.

I guess I’ve listened to a lot of vets say things over the years, and as a much briefer side note, the way to pry an honest opinion out of a vet is often to ask, “If this were YOUR dog, what would you do?” That won’t always do the trick, but it can help.

As it happens, I tried chemo for my first dog, many years ago, and was not at all enthused about the idea of putting another dog through anything similar, so I’m going to go with the wait and see approach. Especially because Ish is not showing any particular symptoms. I will just note that “come back in five months” suggests a significantly better outcome than you’d expect with prostate cancer, so it could be worse.

Ish with a daughter; he fathered sixteen babies in the past few years, all but two show quality.

So Ish was neutered this past Wednesday and is now doing fine, but probably wondering why he is confined to an x-pen. He is such a mellow guy, though, that he is not particular concerned about it. Stitches will be out in a couple of days and then, with luck, he will continue to show no particular sign that anything is wrong for a good long time, and in that case the prostate-related issues should have time to resolve and we will both by happy about that. In the meantime, many extra treats are in Ish’s immediate future, while I decline to listen to the winds of mortality blowing in our direction.

AND

I hope that’s it for unexpected distractions of a medical nature and that next week the only important news is that I have sent out the draft of Sekaran to early readers.

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