We took Joules to Terni today for his first follow-up.
The ultrasound showed that his organs and lymph nodes were fine – no signs of cancer.
However it also revealed a slight problem with his kidneys which wasn’t there at the time of the last ultrasound. It might have been caused by an infection when his white blood cell count was low due to the chemotherapy.
I was given some ‘pearls’ (gelatin capsules) of Omega 3 with vitamin E to give him – 3 a day for the foreseeable future. I won’t be able to resist jokes about swine and wisdom.
We returned home to a real mess. Kepler had somehow managed to get a book off the bookshelf and had shredded most of it with great thoroughness all over the floor. (It was a dictionary, giving new meaning to the phrase ‘swallowing a dictionary’.)
He was extremely hyperactive for about an hour, then just collapsed on his blanket under my desk and went fast asleep.
Joules of course was delighted to be back, and so are we delighted that his future looks as rosy as anyone’s can be.
We’ve just made a third fruitless journey from Valtopina to Terni (two and a half hours round trip) hoping and expecting our dog Joules to be given his fourth chemotherapy injection. It would have meant he was half way through the cancer treatment and I could believe it might someday end.
But no, his white blood cell count was so low that the line on the graph scarcely lifted its head off the x-axis. Back to the drawing board.
The drawing board involves giving him a twice-daily dose of three-quarters of an antibiotic pill. I ask you. Dividing it in half is fine; the pill was designed for that. But splitting it again … A knife makes no headway at all because there’s a smooth coating on the pill; pliers crush one of the quarters. The best solution so far is pincers.
A happy Joules in his Elizabethan collar
But the worst of it is that there are 2 pieces to give the dog. Inserting 2 pieces into a moving target (the dog’s open mouth) risks one of the pieces dropping to the edge of the tongue from where it can be spat out. The best thing is to do it in 2 goes – but that means he’s forewarned and forearmed for the second go!
Italy has been our home for 8 years now, and this house for half of that time. This blog, which I hope will be a daily one, is intended to document the joys, difficulties and irritations of daily existence as they occur.
We have our own intrinsic difficulties. My husband, Clive, is disabled and I am partly so through a scoliosis.
We have no family but are great dog-lovers, although things aren’t easy in that department either. Our thirteen-and-a-half-year-old dog was recently put to sleep having become incontinent and semi-paralysed. Our six-year-old dog has just been treated for cancer. Our four-year-old dog plays ’chicken’ with the post van but in spite of this is in good health. We’ve just adopted a puppy who needs to urinate about every fifteen minutes.
I love living here. Clive is more circumspect. The earlier entries in this blog are by him and reveal a different attitude.
Maybe, by keeping abreast of our daily life, you will be able to tell whose view is the more accurate. Does the pain outweigh the pleasure? Will my writing betray a less rose-tinted reality?
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