Halfway Point

Raven is now halfway through her chemo treatments. She has had 8 and has 8 to go. On Tuesday they will do a FNA (Fine Needle Aspirate) on her lymph nodes to confirm she is in remission and then start the 4 weekly cycle again – Vincristine, Cyclophosphamide, Vincristine and Doxyrubicin, she has a week off and then the final four weeks. At this point she has come through chemo very well, in remission by her 5th or 6th treatment and with relatively few complications. She missed one treatment due to low WBC, has had a few minor vomiting effects and has a couple of short lived episodes of diarrhoea. Apart from the 15 day dose of Clavulox for an infected toe and this recent cut to a toe pad she has been incident free.
Her tiredness on the day she has treatment is visible and she does sleep more on those days/nights but within 24 hours she is always keen and eager to go out with the others on walks, runs, trips in the car or to training. She has been apathetic about food on maybe three occasions and is always back to her usual appetite within 48 hours. She is heavier now than prior to her chemo treatment starting and I now need to just make sure she maintains a slightly more than usual competition weight. Ideally in agility you do keep them very lean but in her case she needs that extra covering so I have found a balance between the two. She is still on 80% raw and 20% kibble diet; she is being slowly switched over from the Advance Chicken biscuits to the Advance Puppy Growth which is higher in calories/protein yet less in carbohydrates than the Chicken variety. Her raw consists of chicken necks and frames, turkey wings, BARF lamb patties and gravy beef mixed in with Mundella natural yogurt and processed veggies plus fruit. She also gets sardines a couple of times a week and her supplements mixed in. In training she still has a mix of treats ranging from 4Legs to cheese to cooked sausages.
Ken Wyatt is very pleased with her progress and insists on her living as normally as possible and participating in all her usual activities. Since this includes training and trialling I have been keeping up with that.
If anything she is just as fast (sometimes faster) than she usually is on course and with me letting some of our training issues slide in recent trials she is having an absolute blast out on course. To watch her run you would not know that this was a ‘cancer dog’ as I fondly refer to her now. She’s blasting through contacts, giving me grief with her start lines and still insists on a “hanging off the edge” table behaviour. She’s had a few bars down as well but when you put things in perspective as I did I was just thrilled to have my girl out on course again! So now she is feeling much better and is clearly in remission I think I better start reinforcing the ground rules again! I need to think optimistically and positively about our agility career which doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate every chance I get to run a course with her but that I’m also treating her like I’d treat ‘pre-cancer Raven’. So we’ll work on our start lines and reinforce the bar issue - though I have to say on Sunday she did not knock one bar in all four of her runs so she definitely is still aware of her job in that department - so that we can still be a team that tries to be as accurate as possible whilst still being competitive. Speaking of competitive Raven won her first class since chemo treatment began on Saturday. She did a great run in Open Agility and took 1st place even after a couple of wobbles (one hers and one mine!), then Sunday she finished 3rd in Masters Jumping which gave us another Agility Champion leg so that was icing on the cake of a good day.
Cypher has been a trooper recently and pulled in 6 cards this weekend, with 2 legs of Open Jumping (both 5th places), 3 legs of Open Agility (Two 3rd places and one 4th) and a leg of Masters Jumping (5th Place). He’s picked up a couple more numbers this weekend and his whole name now reads;
Nahrof Quick Change ADM JDM2 ADO3 JDO3 SPD GD. Hopefully in the next few weeks we can pick up his SD and SPDX title and a few more legs of GDX. There are still lots of gaps in our skills together though; some we discovered on the weekend include;
*Slow Seesaws in trials (still!)
* Pull throughs on a straight line of jumps with more than 4m distance between them (this cost us a pass in 1 time fault!)
* Smooth off tunnel entries using the pull
* Keeping bars up when accelerating out of tunnels
* Weave entries from a table
The good thing about the weekend is that I noticed we didn’t have any obvious off courses/refusals where he was thinking about other things instead of the job at hand, and he responded well to all my verbal come or name commands. It’s good to see progress in that respect. He did provide some entertainment for the judge on one course (I think it was Masters Agility – we’d stuffed the weave entry from the table). I finished the course doing the a frame – telling him ‘Contact’ as per usual and I kept running on forgetting to say ‘Ok” to release him. When I went to say ‘Hup’ to get him over the jump I noticed he wasn’t there! He’d done his full 4 on the floor contact and was waiting for the release – the judge thought him very cute! I released him and laughing we finished the course. He’s a great dog to run and quite easy compared to Raven and whilst I know this has a lot to do with speed I think it also has something to do with me actually training the foundation skills better!
I’ve started entering him in more as I think the ring experience will only help improve our teamwork.