sweet little Inti

My sweet old doggie isn't feeling well. She doesn't seem to want to move around very much, and was pretty lame in her left foreleg on Thursday. I canceled some appointments and brought her back to the vet yesterday. They x-rayed her shoulders, hips and abdomen. Everything looks great. To get the x-rays, she was sedated, which made her a loopy and confused creature for the remainder of the day.

This morning she seems stiff and reluctant to move. She's on anti-inflammatory medication for arthritis and now she's taking something for pain. She'll get up to bark at a noise, and I can see that her movement is better (no limping on the foreleg), but she's just sitting down wherever she happens to be, rather than going to her favorite places (under the dining room table, by my feet under the desk).

She and Zach were to go to the kennel this afternoon, as hobbitt and I are going to Kirkland with friends for an Uncle Bonsai show. With the ferry, and then dinner, and then another ferry, it'll probably be midnight before we get home, and we need to leave at 4. So I just canceled her reservation. She can be alone for up to 10 hours, and she'll be much more comfortable here, poor baby. I'll ask Mrs. P to come look in on her if she can.

Inti just showed up in our neighborhood in Illinois in August of 1998. She was at least a year old, and probably not much more. That puts her in the neighborhood of 10 years old. For the most part she's been a healthy pup, except for that bout with Lyme disease in the fall of 2002. We've been lucky together, that's for sure.

The vet thinks it's possible that this lameness is a result of us backing off on her Rimadyl, the anti-inflammatory medicine. We had switched her to a half dose at the vet's suggestion on Thursday, and it was that afternoon that she had trouble with the foreleg. I'm hoping that's the case.