The Journey Continues
January 11, 2007

You teach them, share your dreams with them, care for them when they are ill, rejoice in their triumphs and agonize in their defeats but when all is said and done they are still dogs. It’s almost as bad as having kids.
Rosemary and her sisters, Mocha and Thyme, have always been poor eaters, deciding occasionally to skip meals, much to my concern. I have problems keeping weight on all three of these girls. I keep telling them that they need to eat to grow up to be big and strong Iditarod dogs, but do they listen? Wednesday December 27 Rosemary threw up her breakfast, and then she didn’t eat dinner. I’ve had a virus in the kennel and wrote it off to that. Thursday she still didn’t eat and Friday I took her to the vets. Her temperature was 103.5 (normal in a dog is 101 to 102) and blood work showed an elevated white cell count. The vet couldn’t palpate anything, but an intestinal blockage was still a concern. We put her on antibiotics and coaxed her into eating a little salmon.


Saturday she still not eating or feeling better and I took her back to the vets before the long New Years weekend. X-Rays showed a possible object in the stomach and we went in surgically. This is where you really appreciate a good vet. They didn’t find anything, but took biopsies of the kidney, intestine, and stomach. Then they put Rosemary on treatment for stomach ulcers (the next guess) and an appetite stimulant. Because of the sutures where they took biopsies we had to feed her a mix of chicken, rice, and cottage cheese. Not more than one cup every two hours for the next 7 days. She ate some, but was not enthusiastic about it. Monday Marti switched her to salmon, rice, and cottage cheese and she started eating regularly. On Tuesday we got the results of the biopsies and Rosemary had hepatitis and inflammatory bowel disease, which she had had for some time. We added metronidazole to the drug mix and started seeing real improvements.


On Monday January 8th we took a whole different dog back to the vets for a checkup. Nobody knows what causes inflammatory bowel disease, but food allergies are a contender. Rosemary had been fighting this for “some time” and it may be the reason she wasn’t eating well. Her long term prognosis is good and if we can keep her healthy there is no reason she cannot run Iditarod. They did a full belly shave for the surgery, but I have a belly jacket she can wear. If it gets cold (I’m thinking below zero) I’ll have to watch her closely and if it get’s real cold (like -30 or better) I’ll have to drop her. Otherwise I’ll consult with the vets at each checkpoint.


Rosemary is definitely feeling better. She has been living in the kitchen behind a baby gate (it was -14 here two days ago) and has been talking to us telling us how bored she is. She is avidly scrounging the kitchen for scraps and picking up the empty dishes from the other dogs and carrying them around the kitchen. Two nights ago I let her loose in the house with Java and the two of them ran through the house like a couple of teenage kids. It sure was good to see. The vet told me that as soon as the surgical incision heals I can run her again. She is now on three feedings a day and we are reintroducing Caribou Creek (my kibble) watching for any signs that this was caused by an allergy to something in there.


My next concern is Dijon. We diagnosed him as hypo(low)-thyroid and he has not responded properly to the thyroid supplement. Dijon is one of those dogs that sparks a team to greater effort and I’ve missed him. At 20 miles or more he would still be banging his harness, but when he finished the run I could watch his energy level fade before my eyes. He wouldn’t eat (or even look at food) until two hours later. We cut him back to 5 and 10 mile runs, but kept hoping for more. After the last blood test showed he still wasn’t responding my vet consulted with the experts at the lab and the recommendation was to take him off generic thyroid supplements and put him on the brand name. The generic supplements do not appear to have consistent levels of thyroid supplement (either for dogs or the human version). We did that and I believe I see a change already. He has been much happier and more active in the dog lot and last night I put him in lead of a 10 dog team to see what he could do. We ran 19 miles in 1:45 – not earth shattering, but a personal best. Best of all he was hungry and ate eagerly right after the run.


Tomorrow I’ll run him 30 miles and see how he holds up. He still had bad diarrhea, but if he eats eagerly he might make the Iditarod team after all. This will take a major change in training plans. I don’t have a handler that can run a second team for 40 or 50 miles regularly. I’ll have to take the race team back to a distance that Dijon can handle and work them back up. That means a change in race plans because the team won’t be up to the long runs I had planned. But Dijon adds so much to the team when he is feeling well that it will be worth it if it works.


Speaking of Dijon, when we get home after a run I let Balu and Dijon loose to run back to the fenced yard and into the kennel. Last week I went back to tether them at their houses and Dijon wasn’t there. A search of the yard and kennel – no Dijon. I looked up and down the street, around the house. No Dijon! I’ve still got 18 dogs in the dog truck to unload so they can pee (I feed and water at the track after each run) so I can’t just drive off looking for him. I’m pretty devastated because Dijon is a great dog but knows nothing about traffic, mean neighbors, or moose. Twenty minutes later I’m off looking but without much hope. After 10 minutes I’m 5 miles or so away down the old Glenn Highway and here comes a yellow dog run towards me against traffic. I block his path with the truck and open the door as he runs past at a nice trot. I call him – no response. I move after him and he moves into the deep snow at the side of the road and stops. I walk over and grab his collar – only then does he look up kind of dazed and go with me to the dog box. When I get home and unload him he is all over me – goofy dog. I wonder if that is part of the thyroid issue? My dogs love to run, but with Dijon I think it might be an obsession. I just hope he doesn’t get loose in Iditarod or I won’t see him again until Nome.


Worf has the same thyroid issues as Dijon and will go on the new supplements also, but I don’t have the same great hope. He is a great dog, but the team has gone up another notch and I don’t think he can make the jump. Hopefully somebody will adopt him for a recreational team.
Last October Thyme sliced a large piece off her pad on the newly formed ice. It has been slow to heal but finally looks like it is coming around. I laid her off for three weeks until she started to use the leg in the dog lot. Thyme then developed a corn (hard callous) on the remaining that must have hurt to walk on because she went back on three legs in the dog lot. If I bootied her she ran fine on it – but can’t you see me taking a three legged dog through vet check – “she’ll run on all four just fine – trust me”. Monday the vet trimmed the callous and we’ve been putting cream on it to soften the remainder. She is looking better and I expect full recovery.


At the same time Mocha jammed a nail and developed a nail bed infection. After a month on antibiotics we got the bacteria cleaned up, but there is a yeast component that stubbornly refused to go. Oral anti-fungal, topical anti-fungal, and twice daily betadine soaks seem to be taking care of that also. Mocha never demonstrates any soreness in that foot, but it has got to hurt. Tough little girl. She is running swing most of the time, still playing with the dog next to her as she runs. She is such an athlete, I can’t wait for her to mature mentally.


The last couple of nights it has turned cold (-14) here at the kennel. I gave the dogs fresh straw and they were like little kids at Christmas. Balu was so excited he climbed into his house before I got the straw in. Then he barked at me to hurry up and put the straw under him. It took me a while to convince him to come out of the house so I could put the straw in.
Lycos was so excited he ran into his house and spun around and around until he built a door of straw to block the cold air. Then he laid down with his head on the straw door and I could hear the sigh of satisfaction. I’ve seen dogs do this in the dog box to block the wind (Picard particularly) but not in the dog house before. Who says these guys don’t think?
Mocha, true to form, had to do things her own way. She continued to sleep outside at -14 even after I put fresh straw in her house. I relented and added a bed of straw to the area she was sleeping in and she seemed to appreciate it.


We’ve gotten substantial snow over the last two weeks and were on a training run following a snowmachine track that broke out our trail when Bass and Dash lost the trail and were floundering in 8 inches of untracked snow. I stopped the team with the snow hooks barely holding in the loose snow, walked up to the front and couldn’t see the trail either. I stomped out a loop the turn the team around, but when I pulled the snow hook Bass and Dash took off in a different direction. I stopped them again, walked up front and thought I saw a trail 10 feet further out. Why not? I pulled the hook and Dash led Bass to the trail and followed it. We broke trail in that soft snow for a mile and a half with Bass occasionally loosing the trail and Dash pulling him back. It was a small 10 dog team, but they moved with a steady purpose that made me proud. My team is not strong climbing hills. This was at least as much work (walking in this stuff is hard, let alone pulling a sled with a lazy musher) but the dogs never balked or looked back. This dog team has come a long way from even last year.


A few days later there was another storm and I had Dash and Platinum in lead. Once again they broke out the top two miles of our 14 mile trail through 6 to 8 inches of soft snow. Then they broke out 7 more miles through 2 to 4 inches of fresh dump. We jumped over fallen branches, went around downed trees, and pushed through low hanging snow covered brush that even the dogs had to push out of the way.

When I first got into this sport I wanted a strong traveling dog team that I could trust to go wherever I wanted. I realized going down this trail that I had accomplished that goal. We may not be the fastest team in town but I don’t balk at gnarly trails anymore. This is a darn good dog team and I stopped and told them so.




Keep ‘em Northbound
Eric
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