June 2008 Archives

It's been awhile since I blogged about Hobbes.  Frankly, things have been going so well that I haven't been compelled to report anything.  Now that we are in the full throws of late spring, our biggest challenge is to keep him from eating grass and rabbit poop.  Yum!!  Unfortunately his sisters are not very good role models, as they both chow down every time we let them out in the yard.  The good news is that Jada, Sasha, and Hobbes are essentially indoor dogs, who enjoy the luxury of air conditioning most of the day, and therefore do not have lots of opportunities to manually trim our back lawn.

There is one thing about Hobbes that is just wierd.  He is a chicken.  While he pretends to be alpha in our house--bossing around the poor girls unmercifully--he is petrified of everything new and different.  So when anything new comes into his territory, he barks like crazy to try and hide his fear.  For example, he went batty when my husband brought a garden hose nozzle into the house yesterday.  Tom put it on the ground, and it took Hobbes 5 minutes to even walk near it.  This is in contrast to how he behaves when we take him places outside of his experience.  As I mentioned in an earlier posting, when Tom took Hobbes to the lappie show, he behaved beautifully.  So, we only see the fearful behavior when something unknown invades Hobbes' territory. 

This fear, and need to pretend to be in control, resulted in a very funny incident last weekend.  Tom and I took Hobbes to meet Jeanne, a local artist who created a sculpture of Kody for us, and is working on an urn for Kody.  She had never seen a lappie, and we thought it would be good for Hobbes to get out.  After a short time outside, we went into Jeanne's studio, with Hobbes, and spent about 45 minutes talking about all sorts of things.  During this time Hobbes was exploring, and apparently began to feel quite at home, because when Jeanne's husband came into the studio, Hobbes decided he didn't belong there, and barked ferociously at him!  It was funny and kind of embarassing at the same time.  Poor Hobbes

Well enough about Hobbes for today, because the big news in our world has to do with Jada.  We took her to the vet because she had an eye infection about a month ago.  Our vet noticed a sty under her lid, but we tried drops first to see if that wouldn't get rid of the discharge.  It didn't, so we scheduled surgery, during which I asked Mark to give Jada a dental cleaning as well, since she would already be sedated.  All was fine, but the surgery did not eliminate the eye infection.  So, about two weeks later I took Jada back in. Mark determined that she had a seeping cataract, and so would stay on her drops for the rest of her life.  During the same appointment, I asked Mark to look at a little spot of inflamation on Jada's lower jaw, between her teeth.  I thought it was some irritation from the dental, but he thought otherwise.  I brought Jada back the next week for a biopsy, and while we are grateful that she didn't have cancer, she did have a highly aggressive and destructive tumor that was attacking her bones.  Within four days she was in surgery, and had just under half of her lower jaw removed.  It sounds horrible, but I am so amazed at how adaptable our dogs are.  She was up and about shortly after surgery, and has shown few signs of slowing down, despite her missing teeth.  She does look a little funny, because she has only one lower canine left, and her tongue sometimes hangs out.  But, on the positive side, she gets only wet food for the next 4-6 weeks (yum!), much to Sasha's annoyance.

This type of tumor is not super unusual in dogs of Jada's age (9 and older), but I have to admit that it most certainly wasn't on our radar.  We were just lucky that the dental coincided with the tumor really starting to grow, because I was more inclined to pay attention to her teeth.  We caught it very early, and thus was able to save more of Jada's jaw than might have been possible had we noticed the growth even a month later.