So remember they hired a guy the day before I left on vacation? He's already history. He failed to come in the day I returned. No message, no excuse, no show. The bosses got on the horn to the placement agency and had someone else come out and interview, and they liked her, and they hired her. Starting mid June we'll have a fourth full time agent, and I rather hope this one works out. None of us liked the guy. He was way too slick. But this woman has been a travel agent for 28 years, so I think we can probably count on both her skills and her reliability. I'm desperately hoping she's got the same sense of humor we all have.
If this works out I won't have to quit to save my sanity. I would really, really like that.
Meanwhile, we've had a bit of a setback with Dixie's health. She's feeling well, I rush to say, but her blood pressure is scarily elevated and her last check up revealed the tumor on her adrenal gland has grown significantly larger. She has Cushing's disease, and it's on the warpath at last. We're upset, but not frantic. We upped the dosage of her blood pressure medicine two weeks ago, and we'll take her in next week to monitor how well that worked. Cushing's disease doesn't really do anything, you see, except make her terribly susceptible to things like stroke, blindness, and infection. It won't kill her outright, it'll allow something else to do so. If we can control her blood pressure for a while, that buys us time. Not time for a cure, but time off from making decisions about surgery.
The one upside to this particular disease is that a side effect of the increased cortisol in her bloodstream, pumped out by the enlarged adrenal gland, is it controls the mast cell tumors she suffered from previously, the ones she had surgery for three times. She's had no recurrence of those tumors. Poor doggie, she got a double whammy from life, I'm afraid.
Anyway, we're noticing some of the hallmarks of the disease, such as increased thirst and panting, and her behavior has changed a little (all that business of not coming in the house is probably related - it may be too hot for her even at normal temperatures), so none of this was a real surprise. It's rotten, though. I do not look forward to making the surgery decision. Well, let's face it. I've pretty much already made it. I said in January 1999 that I would not put her through more surgery, especially a risky one like removing an adrenal gland. But boy, it's miserable having to decide on your dog's death sentence: risky surgery that could cure her, or possible early death due to the surgery or post-op, or let the disease run its course. One way or the other, Dixie doesn't have too many years left on earth. She's only 11. She should have been with us for a long time yet. This is hard news.
All we can really do is make sure our dog has the best possible life in whatever time she has left. It hardly seems enough.
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