So no news for a while – but that’s a good thing. We went to the trial Sunday and Raven was knocking bars, sliding contacts, barking her head off and face planting after jumps….and I just smiled through all of it! The old Raven is resurfacing and boy does she feel good! She only had a couple of runs (much to her disappointment) but she sure made sure she got her money’s worth out of them. She knocked bars in Masters Agility and then I was slack about handling and put her over a wrong jump. Then in Open Agility she broke her start (bloody fantastic!!...and totally against all our training but at this stage in her life I’m just enjoying the vitality of her) still kept first two bars up and face planted after #2 slid along the ground past the entry to the chute tunnel…so we copped a refusal and then she blitzed the rest of the course. It was a great day and so good to be having the opportunity once again. She pulled up fine, did not seem lethargic….enjoyed a pear before the runs and had a banana snack in between. To keep her fluid intake up I laced her water with a touch of milk which means she drank plenty. A vet friend tried to find the lymph nodes for me and couldn’t so it’s not just me being overly optimistic!
Here’s a pic Tim took at the trial over the last jump of Open Agility.
Monday I took her to Liz Franks – a specialist vet in trigger point, and physical therapy and also nutritionist for dogs. Liz has first hand experience of Lymphoma in both canine and human – her Great Dane Ridge back cross was diagnosed at 10 years with the same type as Raven and lived to just before his 16th birthday. Whilst he certainly had all the chemo treatments Liz also believes that his diet was a key factor in his extra long remission time. So we went to have a chat and she looked Raven over and then we discussed every detail of her diet and her options and what we could do to ensure that her nutrition would help fight this disease.
So her supplements have now increased! She is now also receiving;
Zinc Picolinate
This tells you what a picolinate is;
and why Zinc?
Liz also mentioned that recent studies show that quite a number of cancer patients are also Vitamin D deficient (that good stuff we get from the sun!). Of course studies have not been done on dogs yet…..but it was interesting to hear. She asked me a whole gamut of questions and also spoke about the importance of filtering the tap water as WA does have high levels of heavy metals and fluoride in our water. I asked about the effects of lactic acid build up and her feeling tired before she even begins to exercises and she promised to look into what we could do about that on the muscular side of things. I told her what I feed and she was very happy with the balance of Raw to kibble and also stressed the importance of the vegetable mash in her diet. Luckily her taste has come back somewhat and I am heating the mash up in the microwave which gives it some stronger scent as well which I think helps. She is still off her sardines though! I’m not too worried now as she has a good coverage now and is far from skinny, I keep varying the meals and she’s usually eating most everything. I took her out for some UD round work today and she is still very keen, very happy, very up, very Raven. Nailed her glove retrieve despite locking onto the wrong one initially but for the first time she took guidance from my hand signal and corrected – this was a big step in the right direction for her! I really should get more regular obedience training in, there is no reason why she cannot achieve her UD title apart from her own handler’s slackness!!
So that’s it for her update for now, she has certainly NOT missed going into Murdoch this week. She will not be confirmed in remission until they take a needle aspirate of her lymph nodes in approximately 6 weeks time now.
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