i feel sick

it makes me physically ill to hear of another doberman i "knew" dying of cardio. this dog was rah's age, diagnosed 5 months before him with questionable values and his recheck one month after rah's diagnosis showed definite changes. he was medicated, and today the owners found him in the yard, dead.

it makes me ill for so many reasons, but some of them are so very selfish. im sad that anyone has to lose a dog to this disease.

but part of me constantly compares - is this dog worse than rah? better than rah? how long are they getting? what drugs are they on? is the dog doing well? and try to make some sense of everything to figure out just how long i'll have.

this dog was definitely not worse than rah. his holter 10 months ago had 14 VPCs and 4 months ago he had 26 VPCs. single, lone VPCs.

rah had 5000.
down to 1000, and now down to 100. but a dog just dropped dead (that had significally better holter parameters) of a fatal arrythmia.

sometimes im just so scared, so terrified.

its just not fair.

RIP kheper. it's never long enough.

oh the fun never ends

so rah survived a tooth pulling, he survived stem cells -

WILL HE SURVIVE DAILY LIFE?

rah aspirated water last weekend with a near drowning secondary to black doberman bitch on top of him while "swimming"... in other words, between him biting constantly at the water and berlin jumping on him, he breathed in a lot. he ended up with mild pulmonary edema secondary to inflammation from the water disrupting his lovely surfactant in the lungs and mild aspiration pneumonia. (we wont talk about what the cat did that same night... im going to ask for new animals!!!)

and of course today he runs around my fathers backyard and tries to get in the water (but doesn't really succeed thank god, since he cant get OUT of the pool) but he rips his pads up.

BAD DOG. bad bad dog.

ok, worse owner. rah is officially going to live in a bubble.

bad bad me!

it's been awhile - i think at the last update we were waiting for rah's holter results -

well the holter results were GREAT - he had 93 VPC's during that 24 hour period, which is a significant drop from the prior holters - they were on a downward trend, but this was the lowest yet!! he started at 5000 in february, dropped to about 1000, then near 500... so under 100 is great!!! of course, no definite claims for stem cells since he's also on medication, but im going to sit here and think it was both of them :)

bad news came when rah fractured a tooth at the very end of may - and about 2 weeks ago, it started to abscess. i'd been watching it and agonizing over it for the weeks in between, but once i saw pus it was time to do something. i scrambled all over the place, trying to locate a facility that had both a boarded dentist as well as a cardiologist on staff and rah ended up at upenn having his tooth pulled - and he's done marvelously! they were great with him there, very open to my input (thankfully since im such an anal retentive owner, but come on my dog is a scientific marvel!) and he handled anesthesia just fine, no bleeding (since he's vWD affected too)...

so here we are, recovering - he's allowed to start retrieving tomorrow again post-sx and he wants his life back to normal - he says where are the toys?!?!?!?!?