Friday 5 October 2007

Lily is going Bald

Alopecia is quite common in rescued greyhounds. Sometimes it is because they have been lying on hard surfaces in kennels, sometimes it is due to diet, and other times due to thyroid, stress or hormones.

Lily had a tiny patch of fur missing and bald legs when we got her. The le
gs have a much better covering of hair now but the patch on her neck has got worse.

The vet's opinion is that she has a mineral deficiency and that she has seasonal hormonal inbalance. The cure, is to try taking PetTabs as a vitamin and mineral deficiency so that is what we are doing.

Dizzy's paw update

Last night was Dizzy's last chance, to see if the ulcer on his pad had healed (it has been there for 4 mths now!) whilst taking the extraordinarily expensive antibiotic Marbocyl. The verdict was to let him have another course of these antibiotics, this is his 5th course (or more) and 3rd or 4th of Marbocyl, I can't bear to look at all the bills in total, it costs £116 for each packet for 2-3weeks.
Our bill last night was £230.


Dizzy relaxing in my knitting boudoir..ahem some rules have been relaxed

Someone somewhere made a silly mistake allowing that to develop in the way that it did and now we are paying the awful cost. However, I decided to make a decision with regards to treatment without taking finance into the equation, just to see what is the best way forward. So, we could have opted for 4 days on 4 days off to see if that would be just enough to control any infection but having skin ulcers myself, that take years to heal, I just wanted to give him the best chance of healing, he deserves it.

The paw has cost us at least £500, if not more and he may eventually have to have another operation to debride it. Apparently, when he was returned from his first owner, who said she 'it's not him, its me, I just can't share my space with him', he had a wound and we were told that it was because she had walked him so much, didn;t have a car and so it was a blister from pads on the hard surfaces. The vet was not sure about this, he thought it was unlikely to have been a blister from walking and more likely to be a wound where a foreign object penetrated, he did find a stone lodged in there during surgery.

Well, we just have to press on, and it doesn;t look anywhere as bad as it was, but it is quite deep and makes him limp.

Poor Dizzy Rascal!


Toilet Training & Separation Anxiety

Here are some notes that I previously had on my knitting blog about our Missy's separation anxiety behaviour when we first adopted her i...