One Day at a Time

Right now, everything is good. Scooter is seemingly fine...again. Do I dare start to think we are out of the woods yet? I don't know, but he seems completely normal now.
He eats normally, he runs around normally (well, as much as a 14 year old dog "runs". But he is up and around and interested in stuff again). He watched me make his dinner tonight with gleeful anticipation, tail wagging all the time, and I felt almost guilty that less than a week ago we were ready to put him down. Well, the vet was too. He was so sick and so miserable. Who knows what the future holds. We are just taking it one day at a time.

Bruce and I decided to take a little break from the mayhem around here last night. We went out to dinner (we had the endless shrimp at Red Lobster...the coconut shrimp is still the best). Then we hit all the Halloween shops in town hunting down a costume for our cruise in October. There is going to be a dinner and costume party on Halloween night, and we want costumes. Dad and Barb have already bought theirs, but they are being highly secretive as to what they are going to be. We can't have them outdo us now, can we? We saw a few things, got a few ideas, but we still have to contemplate this for a while before we commit. Do we do a couples thing? Or be individually creative? We haven't gotten all of that figured out. But I do know that there WILL be pictures, so stay tuned.

Speaking of pictures, Bruce bought us a new camera this past week. Its another one of the small digitals that I love so much. I LOVED my little Sony that was hardly bigger than a pack of cigarettes. This is an Olympus, still very small, but waterproof. We decided after our river tubing trip that we needed a waterproof camera, so....there you go. Its good up to 33 feet, and virtually indestructible.
You can drop it up to 6 feet and supposedly drive a car over it. Yeah, well, I hope to not test that one out, but it says it will withstand some serious abuse. So far the pictures have been good. But I haven't had any time to actually sit down and figure it out. Maybe I will do that tonight. In our shopping last night, we bought the cutest little Halloween costumes for the cats. Yeah, we really did...LOL. Omen is a witch, and Vixen is a little devil. They hate them passionately, of course. But I intend to get at least a couple of cute pictures out of this deal whether they like it or not. I may be sporting some deep scratches all over my body, but I need cute kitty costume pictures to ring in the fall season!!!!!

Soon

Is it fall yet? We've had some cooler weather, so maybe? Soon? But anyway, things are still semi-crazy around here. Stephen is still recovering from having his wisdom teeth out. He just isn't bouncing back as quickly as he hoped. I think he misses being able to eat real food most of all. But hopefully he will be able to eat soon....Soon seems to be a reoccurring theme lately.

My tooth is finally feeling normal again with all the antibiotics. Of course, now my stomach hurts. Those meds always make me feel like crap, but what can you do? I have the root canal scheduled for Tuesday, so again....soon....things will be better. LOL.

But the thing that has driven my the most crazy lately is Scooter. It was the dog flu. Tests and xrays and trips to the vet that showed nothing. Then he mysteriously got better. Then this past weekend, he got sick again. Just stopped eating, and was lying around feeling feverish and miserable. We got him to the vet again. More tests, more xrays....and she admitted that she had exhausted her arsenal of diagnostic tools. There was a chance that he was just having a really bad time with this flu, or....he might have liver disease or possibly liver cancer. The tests were all inconclusive. The only things that showed up were a slightly enlarged liver on the xrays, and slightly elevated liver enzymes in his blood tests. Could be disease, but not totally abnormal for a dog of this age. She gave us 3 options:

1. A trip to the Vet school in Raleigh for a full CT scan. Just the diagnostic estimate was $2,000-5,000.
2. Hit him up with a whole range of meds just to see if something might work. That would only be if it was just a bad case of flu.
3. Euthanasia. Because seriously, he was miserable.

We opted for the meds. And there are a ton of them. None of them are ultra-expensive, but we pretty much shove pills into this dog most of the day. On the upside, he is doing great, acting normal and eating again. The thing is that if he has a relapse, thats pretty much the end of the line. We will have to schedule euthanasia....because it pretty much means its something untreatable (or even unfindable). So, I haven't been able to relax and just be happy that he is better.
I keep feeling anxious that he is going to stop eating again. But...he is 14 years old, and if it comes to that, then I will deal with it.

Soon....its all going to be better. I am sure of it.