Kevin's musings

Merlin is very slowly improving. He can stand up on his own, and sometimes he can lay down on his own too. A few days ago he started eating small amounts (we have been giving him canned puppy food mixed with water), although we are still feeding him through his stomach tube. His poop is almost back to normal as well, which is great news! I’m looking forward to the time we can leave him alone for the night so we can both get some sleep.

He also really really needs to gain weight. He is down to about 50lbs, when he should be upper 60′s or lower 70′s. ;(

We have had a recent unfortunate string of pet health issues here. ;(

1. Winter the kitty: Losing weight. Bloodwork was fine. x-rays fine. We insist on a ultrasound and they find that she has lymphoma. Luckily it’s the “best” kind and means it should hopefully be treatable by a steroid and some low level oral chemo drug. She might well live out her natural span.
2. Legolas (legs) the greyhound. Limping and having trouble getting around. x-rays fine. Bloodwork fine. On to the MRI. This shows that his old racing injury on his spine is pressing on his spinal colum causing problems. Spinal surgery (including 6 days in the hospital recovering). Happily he’s doing well and prognosis is good. Just need to keep him from falling for a few more weeks and then he can do stairs again and go on (short) walks.
3. Merlin the greyhound. Not eating. Vomiting. Really bad D. Bloodwork ok except he was dehydrated. Started on IV fluids and antibiotics. Still not getting any better, refusing all food. More x-rays. Nothing. Finally a ultrasound finds that he has a thymoma thats pressing on his esophogus, causing him to be unable to eat. Currently he’s in the hospital where they are trying to get enough food in him so he gets enough strength back to do a surgery and remove the thymoma. Prognosis is unknown. If he can get enough energy, and the thymoma is well defined they can remove it all and he will be good, but not sure either of those will happen.

So, hug your cats and dogs and be happy when they are healthy.

It was a very nice day out today. All the pups enjoyed their walk.

They know when it’s walk time.

Burner taking a nap.

I recently got a Motorola Droid phone. I am loving it so far. Here’s a pic from the phone camera on today’s dog walk of Nash, posted from the phone. Hopefully this will make it easy to take and share photos for me.

Picture from yesterday:

Did you know the collective name for a group of greyhounds is a “leash” ?

Well, up until this last saturday, I was walking 5 of them every day. Of the 5, 3 of them were as easy as can be… Kurt (10.5yr old), Merlin (9.5yr old) and (until saturday) Prince the foster (6.5).
Of the other two, Legs the greyhound means well, but often gets in the way or doesn’t realize where a leash is and gets tangled. He’s nothing next to the last hound however: Nash (1.5yr old) the puppy. He loves the snow. Jumping and making little Nash snow angels. Still, despite that, it’s sure fun to get out and walk them out on the walk.

All the pups on a walk.

As you may gather, Prince the foster dog got adopted this saturday! Congrats Prince. I hope he’s having a good time in his new home.
Just in time for us to be heading out to fudcon this weekend.

Sometimes after walks, the leashes get a bit tangled.

This holday season has been pretty nice… we decided to just stay home and relax.
It’s been nice to just have Wendy and I and the dogs around. We’ve both played a ton of Oblivion on the ps3.

I got a nice new camera: a Fuji f50fd. So far I really like it. The image stablization works pretty well, and it takes pretty nice pics.

I am still trying to decide what I want to do about organizing my photos, but as an test I setup a gallery2 site for the new camera pictures…
Follow any of the links on the pictures below to go to the gallery site.

Here’s a few pics from the last few days of playing:

Legs seems to be pretty happy living here.

Wendy does too.

Kurt is doing pretty darn well all things considered.
He was diagnosed with Lymphoma not long back and has been going thru some chemo, but it’s all been going very smoothly.

Some folks came and met Prince today. They are going to look at 2 other dogs before they decide…
he seemed to get along well with them…Hopefully he will get adopted soon.