Getting my okole on a post

It's been dark when I go to bed and dark when I get up.

Mr Z makes the bed. That's the deal, see: last one up makes the bed. This arrangement has saved me from making the bed on half of all mornings since I've been sleeping with him.

Not that I mind making the bed. Making the bed is one way to ensure a good day. If you haven't already done so, get off your okole and go make the bed. It'll turn your day right around.

Anyway.

Zenzi's having surgery today. Surgery means fasting since after dinner last night, and no water after midnight. This morning she has tried to eat two ink cartridges, one shoe, a deck of cards, a cat turd, and her own feet.

I'm fasting, in solidarity, unless you count coffee.

Zenzi will have a 3-centimeter histiocytic mastocytoma removed from her face. A histiocytic mastocytoma is, in a nutshell, a tumor that is formed of mast cells and that releases both histimines and mast cells, causing the tumor to change shape and size rapidly, sometimes overnight, often weeping or oozing what appears to be blood, especially when the tumor is irritated by rubbing or scratching. It's a messy, unsightly, mal-formed, number-two-pencil-eraser-sized bump that goes from tan to Pink Pearl (another eraser reference) to raging red throughout the day.

When I dropped her at the animal hospital, Zenzi's tumor looked like a Barbie-scaled hamburger just achieving medium rare: brownish, with a juicy red trickle in the center.

Your first reaction might be, "But Zenzi's only three years old. Even though she's a boxer, she really shouldn't be getting tumors until she's much older, should she?" Or maybe your first reaction is simply, "Ew. Gross."

It's true that older dogs are more likely to develop tumors.

It's also true that younger dogs with severe food and environmental allergies are likely to develop this type of tumor. It's all tied together, the allergies, the yeast and bacterial infections, the tumors. I suspect, because I am one of those holistic nutjobs, that Zenzi's physical condition has a lot to do with her mental condition, too. Think about how you feel emotionally when you're sick, especially when you've been sick repeatedly and there's all this work to do: you're frustrated and your patience wears thin and you're cranky and you snap at the drop of a hat.

To catch anyone up who was lucky enough to miss it, Zenzi, six or eight weeks or so ago, attacked another dog.

It was dark. As is our custom, we were walking her at an off-time on the college campus across the street from my house because it's an area where dogs are not typically walked. We do this because Zenzi is difficult to manage on-leash in the presence of other dogs. Hell, she's difficult to manage in the freakin' house when other dogs are walking past it.

So, she'd made a deposit on the library lawn and I handed off the leash to my friend in order to bag the poo. I saw a trash can and doubled back toward it just when Zenzi spotted a small, elderly, sickly dog being walked by a small, not quite elderly woman, and bolted. I saw this and called for her to WAIT.

She almost made it into a full sit.

She looked over her shoulder at me, knew I was too far away to stop her, and bolted again.

There was a lot of yelling. Not from me. Not from my walking companion. I can't blame the small woman for panicking, but it really did not help matters. Yelling in the presence of an already aroused dog only adds fuel to the fire. Still, had my sick little dog been under attack, I probably would have been yelling.

Once I got hold of the leash, my fearless and quick-thinking walking companion (who happens to be a nurse) unlatched Zenzi's jaws from the withers of the sick little dog. I asked her to head home so I could safely have a look at the little dog's injuries (4 punctures, minimal bleeding) and give the other dog owner my address & phone so she could follow up with the animal cops after getting her dog safely back across US-31, to her own neighborhood, into her own home.

No idea, to this day, what prompted the lady to walk after dark at the college, though it's well within her rights to do so. I'm just saying, I have tried to accommodate Zenzi's need for exercise while being reasonably careful concerning her mental state.

The animal cop showed up the following afternoon. My friend felt responsible and wanted to pay, but I paid the fine because it could have happened to anyone and the buck stops here. I told the animal cop, should the other dog develop an infection or other complications, I wanted the bill. He said the other dog did not require treatment. I followed up with a visit to Zenzi's vet a few days later, mostly seeking treatment for an allergy flare-up, but we did discuss the attack, too.

Prozac was suggested. Half of all dog-aggressive dogs treated with Prozac become more aggressive, so Prozac is out of the question. The Dog Appeasing Pheromone (D.A.P.) collar didn't do shit. Waste of money.

I decided, and I don't expect to win any popularity contests with this decision, to put the zaps on her. In the house. Train her, for the third time, mind you, off the windows.

Before: A dog approaches the property, Zenzi's hackles go up, the barking and growling starts, she's bouncing off the picture window, Mr Z or one of the kids is, or they all are, yelling at her to knock it off, through clenched teeth I'm telling people to stop yelling as I'm stopping whatever I'm doing in order to physically remove Zenzi from the window, get her into a sit, wait, settle, wait, settle, wait, settle ... until the coast is clear. Exhausting -- there are a lot of dogs in my neighborhood and most of them get walked twice daily.

Rainy days or bitter-cold days are easier than sunny and seventy around here.

My thinking was that if I could get her trained consistently off the windows, our lives, at least in the house, might improve. If it worked, maybe the zaps would work outdoors, on-leash, as well.

We haven't gotten that far yet.

After a week of zap-training, and I mean zaps on the second lowest of ten intensities, the lowest effective correction which caused no vocalization (vocalization is French for "yelping), Zenzi has been responsive, all last week and this week, to "Off. Come," when she approaches the window, quietly, hackles-up, while not wearing the remote animal torture bad karma-earning collar from Hell. She still feels the impulse to guard her turf, but she's learned not to vocalize or bounce on the window glass.

It's one baby-step in a better direction.

Animal Cop wants her muzzled in public.

Animal Cop doesn't want her at certain dog-frequented city parks, muzzled or not.

Mr Z has been doing his part, playing a lot of extra boudoir-football to supplement her too-short walks the last few weeks. He takes her upstairs, feeding her enthusiasm as she ascends, "Football? Let's go! Let's play football! Come on!!!"

He says she's the champion flanker of her species.

He stands in the sitting area of the bedroom and pitches the fuzzy, neon-yellow, squeaky football over her head. She runs like hell to catch it, either snatching it from the air, or pouncing on it just as it hits our tattered bedspread. Sometimes, if the ball bounces just so, Mr Z will try to out-run the dog and catch the toss himself. They end up in a man-dog log-jam on the middle of the tattered spread that covers our breaking-down-quickly bed; it's anyone's guess as to who's got the ball.

Zenzi usually has it.

She's really good, it's true. She's the best boudoir-ball flanker in all of Canidae.

They love this game.

I hate it.

I hate it because I've been going to bed after dark and getting up before daylight, as I have always done, and Mr Z has been sleeping in, as usual, and therefore he's been making the bed, so, I didn't realize, until laundry day last week, that I've been sleeping in enough dog hair to stuff a mattress or that there is tumor-ooze on my pillowcase. I started checking the sheets daily, mid-morning, after Mr Z leaves for the office.

I'm not pulling a martyr-move here.

I'm just saying, conditions in the boudoir have gone beyond "earthy." I'm saying, maybe, that dog hairs and tumor-ooze are not exactly beach sand, or even forest floor (yes, I can be earthy enough, for sure), let alone rose petals. And even though I've said as much to Mr Z -- "Honey, I washed the sheets even though it's Wednesday. They were covered with dog hair again and her tumor oozed all over my pillow, so it was either wash them again or sleep in the den" -- my husband engaged our puppy-girl in several more rounds of boudoir football and just doesn't get why Zenzi's the only player scoring these days.

Vet wants to excise the tumor, create a treatment plan based on the tumor's pathology report, continue to treat the allergies, treat the aggression with a non-Prozac anti-depressant recommended by a veterinarian/behaviorist who specializes in such treatments, and she wants me to bring Zenzi to her home to train with Lucy, her docile, "push-over" pitbull. Vet is not convinced that Zenzi's aggression can not be eradicated.

Either that, or she's convinced that my wallet has no bottom. I'll limit my harsh, cynical words to those at the beginning of this paragraph. I'll end this paragraph now, before temptation to unleash a mile-long string of heartless, cold-blooded "people walk on two legs and dogs don't, and people have the capacity to anticipate their own death and dogs don't, and, you know, there is a cost-benefit balance to consider when it comes to making decisions on behalf of our pets" philosophy. I'll just stop. Here. About all that. The only person's disapproval I fear is my own.

Anyway.

Generally, veterinary surgeons like to take a 2 - 3 cm margin with this type of tumor. If the vet takes 3 cm, she'll be getting awfully close to Zenzi's left eye. I'm not as worried about her losing sight in one eye as I am about her being prescribed Prednisone for the rest of her life.

Prednisone would mean doggy-diapers. On Prednisone, she can't hold her urine and does not care. On Prednisone, she switches rapidly between zombie and hellcat. On Prednisone, I can't trust her with the grandbabies.

There's another drug, a non-steroid, that costs more and is sometimes as effective. We're going to try that first.

I have not yet made a decision about the anti-depressant.

If you take anti-depressants, please understand that what follows is not my judgment against you.

As recently as 1996, studies of anti-depressants, including tricyclics and the newer SSRIs for the treatment of depression in human beings have shown, consistently, that these drugs do accelerate the abatement of severe depression in many but not all cases. They do not, however, seem to have any effect, except possibly placebo-effect on moderate or mild depression, or appear to cure any degree of depression permanently, and may even cause chronic relapse of depressive episodes. Further, children who take anti-depressants develop bi-polar disorder at greatly higher rates than children whose depression is not treated with anti-depressants.

The best known cure for depression in human beings, the cure that causes no negative side-effects and some positive ones, the cure that lasts the longest and costs the least, is exercise -- exercise. Daily exercise is the best known cure for depression.

People who combine exercise and anti-depressants experience depressive relapse as often as those who take anti-depressants without exercise.

This is why doctors are constantly tweaking the dose or changing the meds or adding a med to the mix: they don't know what the hell they are doing. They don't know why the pill works for a spell, or why it stops working. They don't know why two people can have identical serotonin levels and one is depressed while the other is not. They don't know. Most of them don't care that they don't know as long as the patient keeps showing up with a sad story and an open wallet and the pharmaceutical industry keeps showing up with paid trips to Bermuda.

If neither medical doctors nor pharmacologists understand these powerful, often ineffective, side effect-riddled medications, how can a veterinarian be any more in-the-know?

I think I just made up my mind about giving Zenzi anti-depressants to treat her aggression. I think I'd sooner buy her a treadmill, strap her to it, and dangle a fresh young bichon frise in front of her nose.

Mr Z is traveling.

I went to bed after dark last night, and got up before daylight this morning. I have not yet made the bed because I assume I need to wash the sheets.

I'm getting my okole off the post and into the laundry room.

Peace out.