When we feed Lucy now, we are feeding her a blended mix of a can of canned food and a can of water. It’s working really well. And she loves it, of course! We have to keep her head elevated for about fifteen minutes so gravity will help the food move her food down into her stomach, so she won’t regurgitate it because of her megaesophagus.
Well, so far, so good. We have had minimal, if any, regurgitation in the last couple of days! Yay! We are feeding her half the mixture at a time, which seems like a lot to me, but her body is able to handle it. The fewer feedings for us humans, the easier it is. Especially when my husband goes back to work and we won’t have someone home all day to feed her.
My husband and I deserve some diamond rings, and Lucy does too, for all the work we are putting in! 
But we love Lucy and will do everything we can for our collie girl. We haven’t heard back about the antibodies test yet for that autoimmune disease, hopefully they’ll come back this week.
If Lucy does have Myasthenia gravis, it could explain why she has been low energy all of her life. And she’s also seeming to lose more bladder control. She always had spay incontenence, but lately she lays down and the pee just runs out of her. And when she goes out to pee it’s pretty clear, so we are getting a lot of liquid down her. We might have to consider putting diapers on our smooth collie girl.
Woo Hoo! I finally set up the webcam again. After all the server changes and such. The image you see here is the actual image on the cam. If it’s closed, you’ll see an image saying it’s closed. If it’s open, you’ll see the real image with no message.
Click Here for the Collie Cam!
However, it won’t really be open until Monday! I may let it run some this weekend, but when we are home we really don’t like it to snap us and so we usually let it snap pictures when it’s off.
There is also now a guestbook on the page where you can sign and leave a comment. And it’s protected by Akismet for spam protection. It’s a free little guestbook script I found.
My favorite part is the archives gallery! It’s a lightbox type photo gallery called MiniShowcase. And it’s free too! It’s perfect for my cam archives!
Click Here for the webcam archives.
I’ve set up a little cron job on my server to upload the Cam is Closed image every day at 5:30 pm Mountain Time.
I’m excited about the web cam being back and being better! Though maybe it could use some Shirley of Hollywood lighting!
I don’t post nearly enough about Angel, our sweet smooth blue rescue collie girl. She came to us in March of 2002 and she was stinky right out of the shelter, and skinny as heck, and had a broken front leg.
I’ve been going through and organizing my old photos and found this one of her. I’m not sure of the date but it’s probably March or April 2002. She’s been with us for six years now, she will always have a bit of a limp, but she’s so much more confidence and happy now!
We called her Frankenpuppy because she had pins in her leg and the big metal brace, here covered in blue wrap. She was so stinky we had to wrap her leg up in plastic and give her a bath! Now she is clean and happy and a joy, and her nickname is Pumpkin Pie. I don’t know why she’s a Pumpkin Pie!
I adore Tony. I just do. He is so sweet and loving. A goofy collie boy. It’s fun to have him back. He’s settling in just fine, almost like he was never gone. He hasn’t changed a bit. When we got him last September he was so needy and desperate for attention. I’m very happy to say he’s not like that now, so he’s gotten some good lovin’s at the home that tried to keep him.
I brushed him out a bit today. I actually feel kinda bad for the family who tried their best to keep him. When I brush him I keep a hand on his collar, and he just does not like to be brushed. He’ll snark and growl and threaten to bite me. He does sound really mean, looks really mean. But I don’t let him get away with it. When he does it I stop what I’m doing and give him a sharp “uh uh!” and we make eye contact and he huffs at me. If he was going to bite me he had ample opportunity and he didn’t do it. He’s all bark but no bite.
But many people who are new to dogs or just don’t understand them don’t know what he’s doing. I am more careful when he does it, too, because I probably am hurting him a bit. He’s got a really thick nice coat. We’ll get him all brushed out over the next few days. And I just love my Mars Coat King Stripper! It’s awesome. I like it way better than a Furminator. It hooks and pulls out the undercoat and does a great job.
So here is Tony with much of his coat brushed out. We probably have at least that much more to come out, maybe twice that. We’ll get it all! We do it in short sessions so he doesn’t get too grumpy about it! After I am done he runs around the yard like a goof ball, he sooo hates being brushed!
With all that running we won’t need to read a Fenphedra review, we have enough calories burned off!
Sell photos on photrade | By CynthiaBlue
Here is Lucy, our sweet girl who has been diagnosed with megaesophagus. She turned nine last February. She does like eating every hour! And we she seems to be keeping her food down pretty well!
Wordless Wednesday
Sell photos on photrade | By CynthiaBlue
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I was just going through my pictures and found this one of Levi from our last camping trip in April of this year. Isn’t he a handsome boy!
Well Lucy is home.. the husband went and picked her up. The good news is that the vets didn’t find anything bad in her esophagus. It is definitely enlarged, thus the Mega esophagus… but there is no evidence of tumors or anything else bad. And the sphincter between the esophagus and the stomach is fine, too. They even put the scope in her stomach and looked at it that way too, and no sign of anything bad. So they didn’t use the balloon to make it bigger since it’s normal sized.
So the next guess is maybe she has Myasthenia gravis. It’s an autoimmune disorder that can cause the weaking of muscles, and maybe that’s why her esophagus is loosing strength and isn’t pushing the food into her stomach anymore. Our vets are going to do an antibodies test for it… if that comes back negative, they are going to diagnose her finally as this being “idiopathic” which means, basically, that they just don’t know what is going on.
We’ll get the test results back for the Myasthenia gravis in about 7 to 10 days. It’s good that she is healthy otherwise… but still, I do wish we knew what was causing this collie’s Mega-E!
*sigh*… overwhelmed. Can you say “Overwhelmed?” We are getting our old foster boy, Tony, back. Big smooth sable collie boy. I think something else might be mixed in there.. I need to find a picture of him and post it up. As much as I love Tony, he’s a handfull. Mainly because of Lucy’s Megaesophagus that she has been diagnosed with. Plus, I’m having PMS which always makes me feel like my life is falling apart. And we already have six dogs. Sure we can handle Tony okay… but it’ll be a stretch until he settles back in or until CAWS can find another foster home for him.
Tony is a big love but… though he likes to bark. I’m going to have to get serious with him and not put up with his barking anymore. Even a little bit. Not sure what I’ll do, but he has got to learn that barking is just not acceptable. He’s a big smart boy, he should be able to figure it out.
My Husband is going to go pick him up today, so he’ll be at our house when I get home. I think he was too much of a handful for his adoptive family. He has a pretty strong will, and I’ve had to make sure he knew who was boss a couple of times. Which makes me wonder if he has another breed in there because collie boys are usually just love bugs and people pleasers. I guess he’s been marking, and that will not fly at our house. Even if we have to crate him. And he’s trying to be dominant, which will also not fly at our house. So we’ll see how it goes when he comes back, and hopefully we’ll keep Chase from attacking him every half hour.
I need a break.
There is a fairly new pay to blog company out there that I’ve signed up with. I do blog for money once in a while, though I try to keep it small and subdued on this blog, because I really love to blog about dogs and dog things and so I don’t want some weird posts to appear that don’t seem to have anything to do with the blog… but sometimes I do it anyway. LOL. Anyway, SocialSpark.com is new and I’m not sure I like their layout yet, but hopefully they will grow and get better over time.
They need more advertisers, though. And I would love to see more pet related advertisers. There are a lot of dog and cat people out on the web, and other animal people, and to get some animal advertisers to get their product information out to the blogosphere would be awesome. We need quality dog food in the market, toys, beds, and other animal things.
The dog food industry has had so many problems as of late, and we need good quality dog food for our dogs. That’s healthy, that’s not tainted with anything bad. There are dehydrated dog food companies, and frozen dog food companies, and even kibble dog food companies that could really get their information out if they were to check out Social Spark. So maybe they will find this a good way to get their products better known!
Well Lucy goes in today for her endoscopy. I think that’s what it’s called… they put a tube down her throat and they are going to put a balloon down there too, to expand the tight spot that is right above her stomach and the lower part of her esophagus. Dangit, I should really learn what these terms are so i can talk about them intelligently.
I’ve been swamped… yesterday was a much too busy day, agility practice in the morning, my work party at noon where the Dazzle Dogzz performed (it was neat!), then my nails done, then I took Tatum to a friend’s for some more agility practice. Today I’m beat and I’m glad I get to sit at work all day!
I hope Lucy will be okay. She didn’t get any breakfast so isn’t too happy about that.
Cynthia Blue
