June

I call this entry June however most of you will not be fooled – you know it’s October already but I say just humour me. There’s an awful lot that has happened between June and now and I am not going to cram it all into to one mammoth entry that would likely rival the Lord of the Rings trilogy for length. So I am going to recall June as best my brain can.

Agility wise and dog wise it was fairly quiet month. Which is excellent really because it was big month on the family front with both my parents going into hospital for a long awaited surgery. My Dad went through a whole gamut of tests and it turned out that he was compatible with my Mum – well enough that he could donate a kidney to her. It’s quite astounding when you think about it, two people with no blood relations can still donate organs to each other. My Mum had been on full peritoneal dialysis for over two years and was up to four times a day in terms of her dialysis. The surgery was on Monday June 15th and it went without any complications whatsoever. Dad was out by the following Wednesday afternoon and Mum was released Saturday morning. It such a huge and momentous event, especially for my Mum and yet it just seemed to happen like this was any typical kind of everyday surgery – which for the kidney ward Nurses and Surgeons I am sure it is but the effect is anything but mundane or ordinary. I half expected bells and whistles and a party fanfare because really this surgery has now extended the life span of my mother by at least a decade, probably more. And the quality of the rest of her lifespan has been immeasurably improved so that she is no longer a slave to a dialysis machine. It’s somewhat phenomenal when you really sit back and think about the implications of such a surgery.

Of course Dad’s status has been elevated considerably – no longer just Super Dad he’s pretty much SuperHERO Dad. We try not to repeat this within his earshot because we don’t want him getting a big head over this. And as this is a retrospective blog (hmmm I like that word – Retrospective – probably too much) I am happy to report that despite a rocky road there for Dad after the surgery during the recovery period (during which he managed to get in another hospital visit to get his gall bladder removed – he has clearly felt the need to catch up on a entire lifespan of avoiding hospitals all together) he is back to working full time and going to the gym (one might say obsessively but I just think he’s abnormally disciplined) and returning more and more to his usually fit and sound self. Mum has also done remarkably well, her follow up blood test visits now becoming less and less frequent – the catheter for the peritoneal dialysis has been removed and she’s even talking about going back to work part time. So far it’s all been fairly smooth and complication free and you have to really remind yourself that this whole process is still quite an amazing feat of medical science.

Trial-wise June is pretty damn quiet. Firstly Spryte is due in season this month. So I didn’t enter too much believing that should would be in fairly soon. The evidence that supported that belief was in the fact that she’d had two seasons already pretty much EXACTLY six months apart. I had her pegged as a thankfully regular coming in season bitch. Of course she must have heard the muttering and decided to shake things up and not come into season till well into July! Females...sheesh. So she has not been in any trials past July 25th. And even in those last few trials she has only been entered in Jumping whilst I work on her contacts again. She’s been doing lots of contact work in the backyard and at training throughout June and most of July.