Matthew Monday: Operations and Anatomy

Some conversations come out of nowhere and they usually lead to something interesting.  The mind of a five year old doesn’t work like ours.  Who knows what inspires them to ask what they ask?

I was eating lunch the other day at the kitchen table.  Matthew had eaten his lunch watching the TV watching one of his cartoons, Olivia I think.   Not sure why but he comes over and asked a series of questions.

“Did Nonna have an operation on her hip?” he asked.  Nonna is Italian for grandmother and how he refers to my mother.

“Yes, she had a hip replacement.”

“Did they have to put her to sleep?”

“Yes, she they had to make her sleep for it.”

“Did she have any other operations?”

“No, not really.”  Actually she had but nothing as major as a hip replacement and I didn’t want to get into it with him.

“Did Brandi have to get an operation on her stomach?”  Brandi was our previous dog who passed away a year and a half ago.  You can go through the Brandi tagged posts here.    

At first I wasn’t sure what he was referring to.  Brandi had internal cancer and they had to open her belly to investigate and pull some cells for a biopsy.  Or Matthew might have been referring to her being spayed, which would have been well before he was born but he might have seen pictures of her with that silly cone they put around their necks to prevent them from touching their stitches. 

“Yes, Brandi had an operation on her tummy,” I said, wondering where this would go.

“Did they have to put her to sleep?”

"Yes, they had to.”

“Did she have an operation on her penis?”

What?  Did he actually say ask that?  I guess he did. 

“Uhh Brandi was a girl.  Girls don’t have penises.”

“Oh, they don’t?” he said running back to the TV. 

End of conversation.  I can only imagine.  

Personal Note: In Memoriam, Brandi - UPDATED

UPDATED: 1/17/14, 12:15 AM - I added a few more pictures, Brandi as a pup, another with Matthew, and one with my wife and Matthew.

As many of you now know, our beloved Yellow Labrador Retriever, Brandi, passed away a number of weeks ago.  She had cirrhosis of the liver due to canine hepatitis and lymphoma, a double whammy from which it was impossible to treat.  The hepatitis was something she had for quite some time.  She nearly died from it a year and a half before, but she responded to treatment then.  This time no matter what we did her liver function numbers kept getting worse, and then when we decided to do a biopsy (we didn’t know whether it was hepatitis, canine copper storage disease, or some liver inflammation from something toxic she might have picked up) they found her spleen to contain cancerous nodules which turned out to be lymphoma.  I don’t know if she felt pain in her last days, but we could tell she wasn’t well and she barely ate.  We tried to coax her with all sorts of her favorite foods, but other than some turkey from Thanksgiving she just didn’t have an appetite.

We got Brandi from a breeder near Pittsburg, which is about seven hours drive from where we live.  I found the breeder on the internet.  She was from a litter of three, the light female of three females, and I put dibs on her before she was even born.  We waited for her birth like expected parents and the breeder sent us photos the day after she was born.  We couldn’t wait to bring her home.  We picked her up just before Christmas.  She trembled on the long car ride back, and I think that traumatized her against car rides for the rest of her life.  She was anxious on every car ride she ever had.  Actually the last car ride to the vet where we ended it all was probably the only one she wasn’t anxious, which goes to show how ill she must have felt.  It killed me that her last day required a forty minutes long car ride.  I wished her last day didn’t entail that.

 

The way I always think of Brandi, and this goes back to her pup days, is that she was a dog’s dog.  Some dogs, like Sasha our previous dog, living amongst humans begin to take on human qualities.  Brandi loved to do doggy things all her life.  She loved to bark, chew bones, spring after birds, chase squirrels and cats, protect her territory from her perch against the front glass slider and bark at the pedestrians in the street, and call out to the other dogs.  She loved the company of dogs, and though she never hurt a fly, she could roughhouse with Rottweilers and Pit Bulls.  She was fearless.  An aggressive dog never intimidated her; she assumed they all wanted to play, but when they showed their teeth she could show hers back too.  She would go from roughhousing on one corner of our walks to sniffing and rubbing shoulders with the friendly dogs on the next.  Once catching me by surprise and dragging me along (she was very strong) she lunged after a kitten on the street that was caught unaware.  To my shock she actually caught the kitten, not with her mouth, but by hovering over it, and instead of biting she licked it, until the kitten realized the huge dog over her and darted away.

 

 

Brandi was the sweetest dog you would ever know.  There wasn’t a mean bone in her body.  She loved to bark, and her barks could be loud.  She had strong lungs.  When strangers came her barks held them in their tracks.  But then you heard the rhythm of her barks, a rhythm of threes—woo, woo, woo—woo, woo, woo—woo, woo, woo—with rising upscale notes made you realize she was there to rub up against you.  She just wanted affection.  And she was persistent.  As with our first dog, I refused to let Brandi on the sofas.  But she wouldn’t take no for an answer, and once she got her way she would squeeze between me and Rochelle on a two person love seat.  She was a ninety-five pound Lab who thought she was a lap dog.  She was always pressed up against one of us.  And then she got her way again by climbing into our bed.  It wasn’t so bad at first at the foot of the bed, but by morning she found a way to angle in so that I was half falling off.

When Brandi was a pup we thought she was dumb.  After all, our previous dog, Sasha, was a Golden Retriever and smarter than most humans.  Brandi, we thought, couldn’t possibly measure up.  She didn’t pick up on training at first.  In fact she almost failed her dog training class.  But it wasn’t from a lack smarts.  She just had an exuberant personality.  When we were in private she performed her commands flawlessly.  But at the class with all the people and dogs around, with play noise and barking sounds, and with the smell of foods in the air, she just wanted to engage people and join the action.  She really wanted to play with the other dogs.  

So we thought her dumb but she repeatedly outwitted me.  As a pup we would limit her to the kitchen when we were out, especially since both of us worked and she was alone for a good part of the day.  I would block her in the kitchen.  Wouldn’t you know it, when we got back she was out and roaming the house.  Usually she would be on the top of the upstairs landing since she knew how to climb the stairs but hadn’t yet learned how to go down.  I would say she would escape just about every day no matter what adjustments I made.  It came to the point that we decided to call her Houdini.  I never did know how she kept getting out. 

And really I have to say she might have been smarter than Sasha.  In one of the fields we’d walk to, there’s one ball field that sectioned off a playground with a high chain linked fence.  I would throw a tennis ball over the fence and she knew how to go down about forty yards to the playground entrance, make her way through the playground on this chopped up rubber tire turf, the slides and jungle gyms, forty yards back, find the tennis ball, and make her way back out and to me.  It’s not like I trained her.  She just figured it out herself.  All I did was throw the ball over, and she came up to the fence, looked at the ball, and ran toward the entrance.  And what joy she had when she came out with the ball and ran towards me.  Like most Labs, she did nothing at half speed.

 

 

Brandi was just a great family member.  She would always be around one of us.  Once Rochelle stopped working Brandi became her shadow, lying by her in the kitchen as she cooked or by her feet while on the computer.  There was just a special bond between the two.  If Rochelle and I were sitting on different sofas, she would be by Rochelle or on the sofa with her head on Rochelle’s lap.  Her greatest act of love was in accepting the baby when we brought Matthew home.  We worried she might be jealous as some dogs who have established their role in a household might be.  We worried she might be aggressive with the baby.  But she just sniffed his tush and tried not to bump into him.  And she stood under his high chair hoping for food to fall down.  She loved us and we loved her.

Matthew Monday: Accepting Brandi’s Passing

It’s been a week since we had to euthanize ourbeloved Brandi, and I think it’s finally sinking into Matthew that Brandi is gone.  He understands she’s dead and that now she’s gone to heaven, but I think until this weekend he expected her to return.  Today I finally saw sadness that she’s gone for good.  He even asked if she’s with God.  I said she was and that she was playing with our previous dog, Sasha, which Matthew has never seen.  Sasha died a few months before Brandi was born in 2003. 

 

Here’s a picture from Brandi’s last week, where the three of us are sitting on the couch.  Looks like I was reading to Matthew while Brandi rested in one of her favorite spots.

 

Losing a dog is like losing a family member.  I can tell you the pain has not softened around here yet.

Personal Note: It’s Going to Be a Hard Advent - UPDATED

Tomorrow starts Advent.  As I’ve mentioned, my dog Brandi is in her last phase of life.    Let me bring you up to date since that post.  Actually let me go back a few days before that.  We brought her home from the Vet after her biopsy on Friday, November 22^nd.  She ate sparingly that day and the next, but she did eat, but the on the Sunday she didn’t want anything at all.  I thought for sure it was a signal for the end.  I even sent an email out to a few friends asking for their experience. 

But then there was a minor miracle.  When we left the Vet's office with her Friday, the vet forgot to include her pain killer medication. Remember she had a biopsy and they opened up her entire belly. The medication was on the list but we didn't have any and the instructions said only if necessary. And then Sunday night it dawned on me that she was in pain. It was just the way she was walking that tipped me off. So Monday we called the vet and he looked into it and found they had left it out and didn't get into our bag. So I got on my horse and raced down to the vet hospital (it's like forty miles away) and picked it up and got back and gave her two pills and then she started moving better and interested in eating. It was like that all week.  Actually yesterday, Friday the 29^th was the most promising in that she ate over a cup of leftover turkey in the morning and over a cup at night.

Today there was a turn.  She refused food all day long except just before we had our Vet visit in the afternoon.  Then she ate about a quarter cup of turkey.  And then at the Vet the doctor noticed her belly was distended.  It’s filling with fluid, which is a bad sign the liver is completely shutting down.  We were surprised that Brandi had not lost any weight when she got on the scale.  But it’s due to fluid retention.  I’m afraid she really doesn’t have much longer to go now.

I'm really looking forward to Advent. I need a change. Poor Brandi is dying and has only a few days, a week at the most, to live. I'm feeling all sorts of aches of love which is clearly a desire for Jesus. One day this week we will have to make the final decision, and it's really going to hurt. This Advent will be like no other. Except for my grandfather when I was young, I have never lost a loved one during the holidays, and his passing was rather sudden. May one day Christ come for the final time and bring all my loved ones back together in one embrace. Come Jesus, come.

Here's Brandi from earlier in the week resting comfortably at her favorite spot on the couch.  If you look carefully at her shaved belly, you'll see the stitches from the biopsy.

UPDATE, Sunday, Dec 1st, 9:45 PM

It came faster than we expected. The liver had shut down and she wasn't eating or urinating for 24 hours. When she finally urinated it was dark orange.  Then she threw up what water she drank. She was weak and having difficulty getting around.  It was time. This afternoon we put her down.  Brandi passed from this earth at around 3:45 PM.

 



Personal Note: Brandi’s Diagnosis

Last week I mentioned my Yellow Labrador Retriever, Brandi, underwent a biopsy on her liver because of high liver enzymes that would not get corrected with diet and treatment.  I also mentioned that while undergoing the biopsy they found nodules on her spleen and removed it.  Both the liver biopsy and the spleen were sent to the lab for testing.

The results are in and it’s not good.  “The spleen showed evidence of lymphoma.  The liver was consistent with cirrhosis (end stage liver disease)” and “due to severe chronic active hepatitis.”

This is a double whammy.  The liver disease might still be treatable since the liver is such a recoverable organ.  However, the lymphoma is a cancer that travels the entire body.  It’s highly unlikely it’s isolated in the spleen.  Brandi’s “prognosis is poor.”  The doctor thinks she has about six weeks or so. 

Among other drugs, she is getting prednisone which has stimulated her appetite.  She’s eating quite a bit, except her hepatic dog food, which she detests.  She’s also drinking quite a lot, and she needs to relieve herself every couple of hours.  She’s had a few accidents in the house, and they are large puddles.  We’ve limited her to the ground floor and Rochelle has been sleeping downstairs to try to take her out when needed. 

Brandi is so happy to be at home, sitting or lying down in her favorite spots.  She’s certainly not her energetic self, and she stays by one of us every moment.  She always had a special affection for my wife, and now she never leaves her side.  Let me leave it with an understatement, we are all pretty much broken up over this.

The veterinarian’s discharge report had the following statement: “Brandi is a sweet girl and wonderful patient.”  Yeah, that’s Brandi.  Even with the people who were probing and sticking her with needles, she was sweet and wonderful.

Here’s a picture I found of Brandi when one day my wife decided to put a cap on her head.

 

 

Music Tuesday: Dog and Butterfly by Heart, for My Yellow Lab, Brandi

This is a very pretty song, probably unknown to most people.  It’s by the group Heart, led by the Wilson sisters, Ann and Nancy, and the song is about looking back to the simpler time of the female narrator’s childhood.

I post this song for my dog Brandi, who today was surgically opened up for a biopsy on her liver.  Brandi’s liver enzymes for the past four months have been getting higher and higher.  A year and a half ago she had a similar liver problem and after IV at a doggy hospital and antibiotics and special diet she recovered.  It was a near death experience for her back then.  I think I blogged about it, but that was at the J’s Café blog, which is no longer available for me to provide a link.  We never did identify the cause back then, but since she recovered, we moved on, though monitoring her liver through blood tests.

This time she has not recovered from the same medication, and so we decided that we needed to do a biopsy.  When they opened up her belly, the only unusual thing they noticed was that her spleen had several nodules on it, and so they removed it.  I guess one can live without a spleen.  Otherwise the biopsy went well.  She is currently recovering.  It will take a few days before we learn the results.  Yes, the past couple of years have been expensive, but Brandi is a love and joy.  All we can do right now is pray.

Here’s this wonderful song.

 

 

Here’s Brandi and yours truly, back in 2006 when Brandi was three.  She just turned ten.

 

St. Francis of Assisi, please pray for Brandi.