Catching Up: A Graduation and One Sick Pup

I can’t believe how the time slipped away from me since my last post…and me still not finished blogging about our summer!

For posterity, over the next couple of posts I must go back and record a few memorable things that happened the past couple of months.

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First, there was the high school graduation of my baby sister.

Here is little Boo Boo, peeking over my shoulder with her big baby blues, adorable as can be.

This photo was taken while I was home during Christmas break my Junior year of college.

I’ll never forget answering the phone in my dorm room the previous Spring and my mom saying, “Um, honey, you might want to sit down for this…” when she called to tell me that she and my stepdad were expecting.

My mom was keeping up tradition, after all.

You see, her grandmother, her mom and some of her aunts had done almost the exact same thing, having later in life babies or two separate sets of children within the same family separated by a big gap that had them fooled into thinking they were done with diaper changes and middle of the night feedings, and then "surprise!”.

But what a great surprise!

And just so you know, I will not be keeping up the “baby after 40” part of that tradition. The nearly 10 years apart was enough excitement for me, thankyouverymuch (although adoption is an appealing possibility…)

I remember ‘arguing’ that I should get priority on holding little Boo Boo while I was home on break because I lived so far away and didn’t get to spend the same kind of time with her that everyone else did.

None of us could seem to get enough of holding her.

I can still remember rushing off to the media center in college every time I’d get a package from home, because I was so excited to see the latest videos starring little Boo Boo.

The following summer was the frenzied summer that Jeff and I (and my sister J and her husband E) were married.

A couple of years after that, with a baby of our own, Jeff and I found ourselves living in my mom’s basement apartment and when mom was working, I got to watch little Boo Boo.

Rather, she got to help me watch Jericho. She was such a good little helper, and Jericho would coo and giggle and smile so big for his auntie.

I have a lot of wonderful memories of ny little sister during that time.

She was a huge fan of Toy Story, loved having me read Bible Stories to her, and helping me put Jericho down for his nappy-time before she went down for her own. She also loved ‘helping’ me bake, especially if it was cookies.

One of her favorite things back then was the old animated version of Peter Pan, particularly the character Smee.

She went through an all-things-piratey phase, and we often took her to play at a place we referred to as Pirate Ship Park. We kept a scarf and a fake earring and a toy sword in the car for her to play wtih whenever we took her there.

Here she is with her two oldest nephews, my sister’s oldest, T, and on the right, Jericho.

Little Auntie Boo Boo adored her little nephews, and they adored her!

Jericho would look at her so earnestly while she chattered at him. Here he seems to be replying, “Are you kidding me?”

And then…we moved far, far away.

It was like our lives had clicked into fast forward because all of a sudden, here she was graduating (as class Valedictorian, no less…little miss SMARTAY!).

And here she is now, my beautiful 'baby' sister, otherwise known around here as Auntie Alison. And she is every bit as beautiful inside as she is outside, and has a great sense of humor).

Sooooooo very proud of you, Ali! Looking forward to seeing what the Lord has in store for your future!

:: :: :: ::

Secondly, Parvo.

That dreaded doggie disease that usually affects puppies.

Oh, how we loathe it.

Years ago, when Jericho was in Kindergarten, we had a horrible experience with it…

(**cue wavy flashback effect**)

Mosely had wormed his wriggly self into our hearts from the moment we first brought him home, and we were all immediately and hopelessly attached to him.

How Jericho (and Jeff and I) adored that little pup.

Jericho wasted no time at all incorporating him into our family portraits.

Here, Cousin K is also pictured along with his pup Sarah, Mosely’s sister.

Mose was a fantastic and beloved part of our family. So much so that we planned to eventually breed him to carry on his legacy.

But it was not to be. Our beloved Mosely succumbed to Parvo at just over one year old (7 years in dog years).

Now I have cried over a few deceased pets during my lifetime, but never so much as our Mosely.

What made it particularly hard was that Jericho had just started Kindergarten a few days earlier, and while other children were happily chattering and excited those first few days of school, he was in mourning for his beloved puppy. To explain the whole thing to him was one of the hardest things we've ever had to do.

It didn’t help that during the previous school year when I would drive Jericho’s cousins to school in the mornings, Mosely would hop in the cab of the truck with us, so excited to ride along. After that, well, the drives to school just weren’t the same, and that reminder was with us for a good long while.

** end wavy flashback effects**

Fast forward nine years, and little brother Judah was weeks away from beginning Kindergarten.

One morning we noticed that our little Ticker began acting really mopey and sad. She wouldn’t touch her food.

At first, I thought it was just the ‘dog days of summer’, and that the desert heat was getting to her. I wondered if maybe she was just thirsty, because for some odd reason, our dogs’ water dishes kept getting overturned each day, and so for the umpteenth time went out and refilled the dishes with cool water.

But after keeping a close eye on her all day, she seemed to be getting worse.

A day or two before I’d noticed that our entire bed of flower bulbs (100+ bulbs) had been decimated. Dug up completely, bulbs scattered all over the back yard like so many green onions.

Then, I discovered she’d been sick, and it was evident she’d eaten some of those bulbs.

I was concerned that some of the bulbs might have been toxic to her and was kicking myself for not writing down somewhere what all I’d planted so that I could look it up.

I remembered my sister’s family having had a very sick dog years before who had eaten something toxic and was staggering around the yard in agony, miserably sick. After talking with her about it, she mentioned that the first thing their vet did was to pump that dogs stomach full of charcoal, and within 24 hours, that dog was back to her usual self.

It happens that we keep a supply of activated charcoal in our medicine cabinet in case of the flu or food poisoning and have even used it to knock out a bad sore throat that wasn’t responding to the usual gargles and echinacea. (It works by taking toxins out the other end, if you know what I mean). Good stuff, that activated charcoal.

Well, it couldn’t hurt to try, I thought. I sprinkled the capsules into a clean bowl of water, and after sniffing it, lo and behold she guzzled down a good amount and managed to keep it down.

However, she was still not her normal wriggly, excitable self, and rotated between sprawling herself out on the cool of the concrete or lying in her doghouse looking pitiful, her usually wet nose dry.

She looked pitiful…I’d only once before ever seen a dog look so sick, and that was--

…Mosely.

Dread filled my heart.

Not Parvo! Not just before Judah goes off to Kindergarten! Oh, Lord, please not, I prayed. We immediately gathered around as a family and prayed over our little puppy, and then decided that a trip to the vet was in order.

Our backyard neighbors to the right had a couple of pit bulls which had recently given birth to a large litter of 9 or 10 puppies. Puppies that had been whining and whimpering for the previous couple of weeks while we were trying to sleep at night and at the first light of dawn each morning.

At that time, the puppies were only 3 or 4 weeks old (too young to be weaned and given away), and I remember thinking how odd it was that they suddenly began to disappear one by one until there were just two remaining.

Of course, I didn’t think of any of this until we found ourselves in the Vet’s office…where we'd just learned Ticker had just tested positive for Parvo.

One of the longtime Vet assistants who had administered that test said that science has confirmed that it’s highly contagious (she likened it to touching wet paint, and then anything you touch after that gets paint on it) and can be tracked around on the soles of shoes, and the germs can remain in the soil for up to a year or longer in infected yards. Because of this, even indoor dogs can get it.

We would need to be especially vigilant to sterilize our patio area with bleach solution and also have designated backyard shoes and be sure to keep the dog messes picked up in the yard to try and keep it from spreading to friends and family (and possibly neighbor dogs) that came over. And so far, so good on that score, thank the Lord.

She also commented that it can be spread by nose to nose contact through fences, but that they always see a huge surge of cases as soon as the weather in our area turns hot and the flies come out. Because of this, she had her own suspicions that flies were carriers, landing on infected messes in one yard then flying over the fence and landing on a bowl of dog food in another. It’s just that contagious, dastardly virus that it is.

The Vet made us no promises, but said that it boded well for Ticker that she had not begun the lethargic drooling stage nor did she have any bleeding out the other end. We’d caught it early, which meant a greater chance of fighting it off.

He also explained that what usually deals the final blow to a puppy is not the Parvo itself, but a secondary infection to the blood marrow that can be aggravated and hastened by the dehydration brought on by the Parvo virus.

Long story short, they sent us home with an IV drip bag that contained a strong antibiotic to head off that secondary infection.

We had to administer it twice a day (by IV) into the skin at the scruff of her neck. Thank God Jeff was there to do that part morning and night while I held Ticker still, because injecting her with the IV needle made me a little woozy. This procedure gave her a temporary camel-back, as the fluids would leach into her system through the muscle tissues. We were thankful they gave us that option, because it saved us a bundle (hundreds of dollars) on overnight E.R. care.

The following morning, Jeff was up at the break of dawn getting the IV bag ready and thought, “I wonder how Ticker is doing?”

Just then, he looked out in the yard and saw Ticker loping around with a stick in her mouth, whipping it around in her usual playful, wriggly way. That fast, she was on the mend.

By God’s grace, even though she did get Parvo, it didn’t get her…nor did it affect our other dog Raisin. After seeing all those other neighbor puppies disappear one by one, we truly believe it was a miracle and a direct answer to our prayers.

And there was much rejoicing in our household!

On a side note, we also figured out why the dogs water dishes kept getting overturned.

A week or so after she was completely well, I saw her dip her entire head into one of her deep water dishes then rear back and shake off like she’d just come out of the water from a swim, tipping the big bowl over in the process.

Our desert-dwelling Lab/Retriever mix was trying to communicate to us in her own way that she needed a small pool to play in (those instincts for water play run pretty strong in these breeds!)

Of course we got her one, and now, not only has she quit tipping over her water bowls, but this is what we see off and on during the heat of the day:

Ahhh, yeah…that’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout! Niiiice and cool. Now if only there were some fish to chase around being that I've scared off all the local pigeons…

And so, there was a wonderfully happy ending to this particular tale.

Judah continues to churn out his own artistic renderings of our dogs.

Ticker is the happy-go-lucky dog pictured at the top of this drawing, and the one below is our grumpy old dog Raisin…but, that’s a story I’ll save for another day.