My wild, weird day

My personal trainer had been making me feel guilty because I had been hiking with Nero lately instead of him.  So today I took Sparky out for a good long hike.  It was a beautiful day, perfect weather, so we put in two hours on the trails but at a slightly slower pace.  We probably covered five miles, or I did anyway, Sparky must have done at least six with all the jumping around that he did.  We had a good time.

Sparky's kennel mate is Gypsy Jr.  She's been one of my back burner dogs that I need to get moving.  But she has been losing weight even after I wormed her a couple weeks back and her poop is soft and smelly.  I collected a sample from their kennel and drove into town to the vet.  She had a tape worm, which explains her weight loss, so I brought home some meds and gave them to her this evening.

While waiting on the test results, the vet who had seen Nero the other day called me in to discuss the results of the lab work they had done last week.  The cultures showed at least three different forms of bacteria.  Two are susceptible to the Cipro, which explains why he improved when he was on it.  The third however, was not, which explains why the Cipro never completely cleared it up.  Nero has MRSA, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

This was first for me.  I didn't even know dogs could get MRSA.  Of course, if any dog was likely to get it, it would naturally be a shepherd.  Nero was not in good health when he came, so he may have had a suppressed immune system that allowed the MRSA to thrive. 

One of the drugs used to treat it was ruled out because it causes liver damage.  The other causes bone marrow suppression, but only in humans.  That's the one we went with, but because of the risk to humans I have to wear rubber gloves when handling the pills.  That's not so bad, but he's supposed to get it three times a day for the next six weeks, along with the Cipro once a day.  I've been feeding him three times a day most days anyway to put weight on him.  Of course, the real test will be to see what happens when we go off the drug at the end of six weeks.  At least we now know what we are fighting. 

The brighter point of my vet visit was seeing Laila and her adopter.  Laila looks great.  She's up to 20 pounds.  She showed off her tricks once she calmed down a bit.  She was very happy to see me but even happier to see her adopter when she came to pick her up.  

They shared with me the results of a DNA breed analysis that was done on Laila.  It showed that one parent was a purebred lab.  That is consistent with what I had been told, although I had thought it possible that Laila had had a different father from the yellow littermates like Woody.  The other parent was the mother, of course, that we knew to be Ginger.  The test showed that Ginger was not a purebred shepherd, which was not totally surprising.  She may have been mixed with some collie, and bits of this and that.  Interesting.

I then headed north of Charlottesville to Willy's new home to finish up his adoption.  I called just before I got there, but soon realized that although I had gone to Willy's new home, I had called Buddy's new home by mistake.  I felt like an idiot, but I got to touch base with both homes anyway, and both are doing well. 

I had put venison chili in the crockpot this morning and I'm glad that I did because I still had work to do after I got home and got the dogs fed for the evening.  Later on, Clay and I dropped off the van for its annual inspection.  I worry about that van.  It has a lot of years and a lot of miles on it, but I need it.  There's a shepherd up in Orange that I need to pick up on Thursday.