Dogged Blog

Wild West vs. Mild Midwest?

It's not that there are no hazards in the Midwest. I went to college here, and I remember two big ones: Tornadoes, and blizzards. And I experienced the first -- in warning form, at least -- on Sunday, when a tornado warning interrupted my HGTV viewing and sirens sounded in my little town. Ended up being just a few minutes of high winds and dark skies, then just some clean-up.

But overall my experience of the Midwest so far is that it's been pretty well tamed. Living in the country in California, as I have, you have rattlesnakes, mountain lions, coyotes, and foxtails (those of us who have had dogs in the West know that they belong on a list with rattlesnakes and cougars). Here, things are older, softer, with the edges gently worn away.

I'm not pretending to be an expert after three weeks, not saying you can't get caught in a leg-hold trap or shot by a hunter, nor am I stating categorically there are no coyotes or rattlesnakes in Michigan. I'm just saying, after growing up in the "Wild West," this definitely feels like the "Mild Midwest."

One danger I started to worry about when I woke up with an itching ankle: Poison ivy. I had no idea what it looks like, however adept I had became at spotting poison oak in all its season permutations. I think my ankle was afflicted by a mosquito bite, but I've thought that before and been wrong.  And in the meantime, I'm studying up on photos of poison ivy.

My dog is not a very large turkey, and neither am I

This is not the first time I've lived in hunting country, so when a friend told me that it's not just deer, but spring turkey season I need to be concerned about out here, I broke out the blaze orange gear for me and the dogs.

It worked fine until now; none of us has been shot. :)

However, I did hear some shots in the far distance today, and realized one thing I don't have, coming from coastal California: Blaze orange stuff I can wear when it's 77 degrees and muggy!

I don't mean the dogs; they have collars, bandanas and even mesh vests, although on Rawley, the orange mesh looks red and so,  not useful.

I mean ME. I have a blaze orange knit cap, and a blaze orange warm jacket. I see people around here in sort of a harness -- not quite sure what I'd call it -- but since spring turkey hunting season is over in two days, I guess I'll just stay out of the woods!

My plans for the holiday weekend? De-boxing!

I don't know if I'm ready to call it getting "settled," but I'm down to these last few boxes. My goal is to get them unpacked by the end of the weekend.

It's cold and raining, which I actually enjoy, but I feel bad for all the Michiganders who lived through a long winter only to spend their Memorial
day weekend like this!

Superbug bites dog: Biting back

I bathed Kyrie with Zymox, soaked her wound repeatedly with Vetericyn VF for wounds, and slathered it with a mix of Neosporin with lydocaine and tea tree oil that's worked in the past. It's far from gone, but it is smaller and clearly less painful.

My poor girl.

Superbug bites dog, the Michigan edition

No, really, universe... more? Honestly, when are you going to freaking let up on us?

Kyrie beat back a series of horrible multi-drug-resistant staph infections about two years ago, and the last couple of times we had her skin cultured -- before I let her go back to the groomer, and before Rawley moved in -- she cultured with no resistant skin bacteria.

Last night, this:

I know the answer to "Why?" is stress. I knew when I decided to do this that it would be hard on Kyrie, but I thought the worst of it would be the trip, not the being here. But since we got here, she's had a really rough and rocky time.

The first thing that happened is that this 12 year old giant breed dog who could barely get in and out of the car and who had just come 2,400 miles without incident bolted out of the car the minute we got here and took off down the driveway and into the road. And this driveway is LONG, probably a third of a mile.

My landlady caught her, and no harm done, but that was just luck.

Two nights later she leaped over a four-foot brick wall that encloses my entry courtyard -- for no reason, since I was taking her out. It was a case of some serious cognitive problems, I think, either related to age or to the medication we had her on for chronic arthritis pain since she became unable to  tolerate NSAIDs (oh, how I miss them!).

She landed screaming like her legs were broken, but she managed to get up and stagger over to pee, shaking hard. She could barely hobble back to the house. I couldn't really examine her, so I maxed her out on her pain meds -- even gave her a dose of Metacam, since I thought her pain itself was life-threatening at that point. While I waited for them to take effect, I started lining up an ER vet, but by the time she calmed down, I realized she'd just hurt her neck and at that point, the long car trip would probably do more harm than good, and given that at her age I wasn't going to do anything heroic, as long as I could keep her pain-free, I was going to give it another day.

She steadily improved and within a few days was back on her normal pain regimen, without the drug that I suspected was causing her to be a little confused. (It was gabapentin; I understand a small amount of cognitive impairment is a known although not common side effect of this drug in dogs.)

Now, just a few days later, when I thought we were possibly going to get back to pre-move normal, I find this freaking thing on her hindquarters, near her tail.

I learned this when my mom was dying and after, during all the hellish crap related to the legal problems of her estate: Stress is a killer. I just don't freaking want it to kill my Kyrie.

God, I'm just so sick of this. I want her to be okay. I want her to enjoy her time here in this beautiful place. I want some time with my girl.

MAKE IT STOP!

A dog bed fit for (and big enough for) a princess!

Do you think Kyrie's new bed is big enough? And do you think she could look more comfy? It's MEMORY FOAM! I have it right next to my desk. :)

Just don't ask me how much this thing cost. I'm ashamed to tell you. But I don't care. She's my best girl. All I'll say is, it's from Orvis. Of course.

One more round with the food demons

You know what's eating at me? Food.

I was lucky enough to find a way of eating that worked for me, and as a result lost 187 pounds over a period of around 4 years, and kept it off for a couple of years. I started menopause and found it impossible to lose any more -- well, I lost a couple of pounds in a year when many women gain weight, but still -- but I was really okay with that. My relationship with food was sane, I was eating healthily, and I felt great.

Then my mom got sick. For a long time I was still okay, although the stress was really getting to me. But eventually she was so ill that she needed me during the night, often multiple times, and sleep deprivation has always been a big problem for me physically. But I loved her, she needed me, and that was that.

And I still managed to eat pretty well, although the regularity of my meals was faltering, and I was not as careful about my portions as I'd been. I gained 4 pounds, lost it, re-gained it, and then three more.

I joined a gym and lost the 7, but soon the nightmare of my mom's cancer destroyed pretty much everything in my life except my love for her. And still -- I wasn't eating sugar or grains or anything starchy. I had some problems, and I gained some weight, around 15 pounds. I was upset about that, but all things considered, I couldn't give it a lot of thought.

In the last two weeks of my mom's life, I broke. I ate sugar, I ate pizza, I ate every comforting thing I could find. I was really shocked that I did that, but I have never been so completely raw and in so much pain as I was then.

After she passed away, I tried to get back on some kind of healthy eating program, but it was hard. Incredibly hard. Much harder than I thought it would be. I tried a lot of things, talked to a lot of people, went back to the gym -- but eventually, my weight gain crawled up and up until it pushed past 35 pounds re-gained.

I don't know if anyone who has been more or less a normal weight all your life can imagine what it's like to be set free of super-obesity and to believe you really had found a way of eating that could work for you forever, that you were finally FREE of a lifetime of insanity around food and obsessing over your weight, and then be plunged back into it again.

I am not mad at myself. I am not beating myself up. What I'm doing is mourning, for a lot of things -- my own past, the loss of my mom, the loss of food as a form of comfort, my own lighter, more limber body.

I had pulled myself back from the worst of it, and had gotten back on track pretty well -- lost some weight, wasn't obsessing, felt pretty good. Then the stress of moving,  the hell of the drive, the stress of being in a new place -- a new place where it's a lot harder to find the kind of food I want to be eating, both because it's unfamiliar and because it's not California.

So now I'm facing this whole process one more time.

Don't get me wrong. I think our obsession with slenderness in this culture is nuts. I think if you eat mostly whole, wholesome foods and are active and don't eat for emotional reasons, your body will probably settle into a good weight for you, regardless of what the charts in the doctors' offices say.  I don't believe my life will be all that different if I lose the weight I re-gained. I am, I think, pretty sane about the whole subject.

All I want is to get free of the sense of sticky, unwelcome food-obsession again. I want to feel loose and free in my body again, as I did even when I still had 75 more pounds to lose. I want to break that false connection that food is comfort, is emotional balm.

I am so utterly tired of this particular battle. I just want it to be over.

The view from a desk in Michigan

This is the view I see from my desk in my new office in Michigan.