Emmie’s Surgery: 7 Weeks Post-Op!

May 5, 2013 · 2 comments

Hello world! I’ve been away from the blog and completely absorbed in life lately — with my biggest focus being Emmie’s recovery from her dual surgeries the last few weeks. :)

Before we decided to do the surgery, I Google’d like a mad woman to find experiences and footage of other dogs who had also undergone femoral head ostectomy (FHO) surgery, but couldn’t find any of a dog that was undergoing both FHO and patella surgery at the same time (in fact, though many other surgeons had done it, our vet had not and we were both a little unsure at how long the recovery would take). So I decided to document hers and throw it on YouTube for other owners who were doing their own crazy Google searches!

Ignore all of my overly cheesy “GOOD GIRL!” right into the mic — oops, I was a little too enthusiastic for her progress! ;) Also don’t mind the fact that Gizmo has learned he loves nothing more than to be the focus of every photo and video and sneaks into everything. And ignore my “I’m a nice wife” commentary in the pool video… Sean, ever self-conscious, whispered, “I’m not in this, right?” and I nodded no… then forgot we were trying to not make comments and blurted that out. Sigh. Videographer I am not.

24 Hours Post-Op: Very groggy, a lot of spaced out wobbles, but she was standing!

3 Days Post-Op: She surprised everyone by deciding she could use the leg about 2 weeks early.

And had to be reminded that no, she couldn’t climb stairs or conquer the world. ;)

4 Days Post-Op: More “Ahead of the Game” footage.

To get an idea of how ahead of the curve she was, most dogs don’t even begin to “toe touch” the ground until about Day 14-16. She was so ahead of the game that she actually overdid it and lost all confidence that she could use that leg – and we had about a two week set back that worried everyone to the point we ran some basic physical therapy tests early to ensure there was no nerve damage and was indeed all in her head (it was).

5 Weeks Post-Op: Hydrotherapy Begins!

One of the toughest obstacles, outside of convincing the dog the leg still works (which consisted of doing physical therapy exercises at home 4x a day), is rebuilding the muscle that inevitability gets lost during the few weeks of recovery that the leg is utilized less. Luckily for us, Emmie loves to swim and swimming is the top rebuilding method for these type of surgeries, so once we got the green light? We set up a 36″ deep temporary pool and begin doing swimming exercises several times a week in conjunction with her walks.

So far she is doing well. She’s still on sporadic pain medication as one of the toughest parts of this surgery was the fact that the lone leg she was left to rely on was just as bad as the one we were fixing, so she gets a little sore. We’ve got a few more months of therapy and focusing on getting as much from that leg as we can for optimum success, but I already feel it was worth all the money and stress — and stress it has been. It’s definitely a commitment to do the physical therapy at home, to carry a dog up and down stairs four bajillion times a day, to watch her struggle or hurt or be unsure of herself. How do I know it was so worth it, though? She wags her tail far more than she has in the past year or so – a clear sign that her constant pain has at least reduced by half! :)

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Not My Life: Why I Got a Little Burned on Blogging.

April 8, 2013 · 17 comments

It happens. Every so often, I get a little burned on blogging.

Reader beware, this post is full of Snark (and very little, if any, editing). In fact, you may not like me as much by the end of it, but know that I still love YOU.

That’s how this works, right? :D

Is it just me or do so many bloggers portray their life like this?

I would read post after post of these seemingly flawless lives. Everyone was living this fabulous cozy life with an endless supply of sunbeams and pony rides. Mornings were spent waking at 10 am, sitting in some dreamy nook amongst a ray of sunshine, sipping organic rain forest certified* tea in a handmade mug while reading some amazing book that another blogger wrote and/or suggested about making life amazing and being our authentic selves, before skipping around their town doing magical things that everyone wants to do or building forts in the yard using vintage bed sheets your great grandmother knitted out of homegrown cotton, before they snuggled into their bed with their perfect mate, tucked in between their precious puppies, drifting away into dreamland, ready to soon start another day of life coated in balloons and lollipops.

“Did you have an awesome time? Did you drink awesome shooters, listen to awesome music, and then just sit around and soak up each others awesomeness?”

Now I’m not saying that people out there don’t really have those lives, I’m just saying I feel like there are a lot less of them than the blogosphere would like you to believe. It was becoming a contest, at least in my reader, to see who could shizzle the biggest rainbow. And while I was glad to see people enjoying their lifes, the snarky Nancy Drew in me couldn’t help but sometimes lean back from the keyboard and think, “Who are you kidding? Anyone with an ounce of instinct can totally tell you’re hideously unhappy in your marriage.” “Please, you don’t get to pretend you are great with budgets when I know someone else bought that all for you.” (Or whatever mean girl commentary popped into my brain). And I also felt like the more made up or fantastical these lives became, the more I saw readers/bloggers whom I generally respected and loved, enjoy their own actually wonderful (more realistic) lives less and less. Mama Bear instinct kicked in (assuming that I even am a bear or even had children, you get the idea).

I, on the other hand?

I muster all willpower to get out of bed by 6 am, immediately regretting the third episode of Dexter/Justified/Walking Dead/Other Violent TV Show Here we so didn’t need to stay up until 1 am watching, and get ready for work – wondering if anyone would notice if I wear the same pants I wore the day before because they’re the most comfy and I didn’t want to wash them after just one use. If my hair is down, I totally showered. If it’s in a ponytail, I totally didn’t. After shoveling breakfast into our faces, tripping on the cats, feeding all the dogs, and hoping I remembered to fill my tank the day before, we go to work. Now work I like… but it’s hardly bunnies and marshmallows. It’s actual work, but it brings me an actual paycheck and some actually hilarious coworkers, so I’ll happily take it. Then I drive home blasting tunes that would make any 16 year old in 1998 proud, throw on pajamas, walk the dogs, crack inappropriate jokes, and try to crawl into bed before midnight, where both of us struggle to find enough blankets to not freeze to death because Emmie has decided to sleep horizontal across the bed and – having just had hip and knee surgery – neither of us has the heart to request that she move over.

And that’s my actual life. And in comparison to the magic one, it might sound like I don’t like my life. False! I adore it (and in actuality, I’m pretty darn organized thankyouverymuch but you get the idea). Sometimes I wonder when blogging what our real lives are like became such a bad thing. Maybe when Dooce or the Pioneer Woman got paid for theirs (don’t get me started – I like her but no, she is not a city girl who found herself in the sticks, but her marketing skills are SUPER). Maybe suddenly everyone wanted to bank on their blogs and the blogs that drew the most readership were the ones who pretended to be their own, unique, special Martha Stewart snowflake.

No one expects you to have this magical existence, and maybe we feed into it because we like to think it’s possible or we love the happy inspirational goodness it brings – but can we be a little real, at least some of the time?

Now I don’t need your TMI stuff. You don’t need to tell me you hate your brother, how trashy your Aunt Barbara is, or that it tends to burn when you pee. I’m fine with those types of secrets. You keep those. I mean it.

But let’s just get a little more okay with not portraying picture perfect, I think it’s exhausting. And when we DO decide to write about something “negative” we’re working through, it doesn’t need to be A Thing where we make every post like I Overcame Cancer but really, you managed to finally get your first adult job and not quit two weeks later. You didn’t Save All the Children just because you are dealing with a fish allergy, or give ourselves fake fears so we can then talk about how we’re Overcoming. Yes, Lots of Caps.

That’s all. Just be you, I’ll be me, and we’ll meet in the middle and have a grand time (where maybe there really IS pony rides and balloon animals).

*Confession: This hippie is totally one of ‘those’ people who buys all her meats, eggs, teas, etc. from local, organic, humane, and sustainable places… so I guess I can’t mock it. ;)

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What is the use of books without pictures? – Alice of Wonderland

March 21, 2013 · 4 comments

Here’s a little infographic goodness for your Thursday! :)


{courtesy}


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My little dog, a heartbeat at my feet. – Edith Wharton

March 19, 2013 · 3 comments

“A person can learn a lot from a dog, even a loopy one like ours. Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing the moment and following your heart. He taught me to appreciate the simple things-a walk in the woods, a fresh snowfall, a nap in a shaft of winter sunlight. And as he grew old and achy, he taught me about optimism in the face of adversity. Mostly, he taught me about friendship and selflessness and, above all else, unwavering loyalty.”

Casa di Moo is having a quiet few weeks in right now. As I have babbled before, our resident princess (Emmie) has always had joint issues – she was just born a little faulty. :) She was born with double luxating patellas, something that can be pretty common in smaller breeds, which is fancy wordin’ for two kneecaps that slip out of their “track.”

Hers were built even a little more wonky, as while most dogs with the condition have their kneecaps slip out of the track when they bend, Emmie’s were most at risk when her legs were straight – so, pretty much, anytime she walked. The result was, as she grew, they tended to stay out of the socket and get harder to manipulate back into place throughout the years, causing her have a “peg leg” gait – but it didn’t seem to bother her any, pain wise, and a review with an orthopedic  surgeon at her 1 year birthday told us we could probably sneak by with pain management and massage for a few more years.

Enter her fifth birthday. She’d been getting a touch slower on walks, and had a few cries and whimpers when she would get up from laying for a long period, or if someone smooshed her a little too much on the bed (I don’t know why, but the entire zoo feels a need to sit on top of Emmie to snuggle, lol). I highly suspected that her bow-legged stance had leg to unnecessary wear and tear on her hip sockets, causing hip dysplasia. I’m pretty familiar with it, as growing up, we had a dog who was in a wheelchair because of the diagnosis (and a nerve disease prevented hip replacement surgery).

A quick trip for some x-rays confirmed my thoughts – for you science nerds like me, below are Emmie’s actual hips! The top is a set of healthy hips. The femoral head (the ‘ball’ part of the joint) is rounded, smooth, well-formed… and it fits well into a smooth, round, clear-to-define hip socket. The bottom view is Emmie’s hips. As you can see, the dysplasia (and bone-to-bone contact from poorly formed ball and sockets) has led to severe dysplasia – cloudy, rough edges, etc.

So after discussing several options, we decided to trust our vet’s instinct (have we mentioned how much we adore him?) and go with an FHO surgery (femoral head ostecomy) on one hip and undergo a knee surgery at the same time. Unlike replacing the femoral head with an artificial joint, they actually cut the entire thing off. It makes one go, “So, uh, how exactly will her leg work without anything in the SOCKET?” ;) Clever you are! Basically – and this is the part that worries me most – she’ll form fibrous scar tissue on the end, enough so that it becomes a faux joint in the socket… and without bone to bone contact, she gets a pain free hip joint! Until that forms, her hip muscles help to keep her “floating” thigh bone, where it needs to be.

We also went with a patella surgery that doesn’t include pins. For as bowed as her legs are, we are fortunate enough that the knee piece is actually fairly aligned, so our vet literally just dug out a deeper, longer “track” for the kneecap to situate in. Many patella surgeries include breaking the knee, moving it where you need, and pinning it. I’ve ready too many stories of pins coming lose, or the rare potential for a blood clot to form and cause the dog to die, that I wasn’t comfy cozy with that form!

So here is our little lady a few hours after surgery – isn’t she a pumpkin?! Excuse the iPhone photo quality!

We’re now on Day 4 and I’d like to say she’s been quite the rock star! It’s a long healing process – but she’s taking it in stride. The first two days she couldn’t do much, but she’s figured out how to potty (and I essentially thought Chariots of Fire should have been playing the first time she got up the energy and willpower to try it, because it’s painful when you’re missing a hip and have a knee surgery as well), and she’s learning daily to tripod it around. We’re doing physical therapy at home, three times a day, for the next few weeks until her sutures come out. From there, she can go do hydrotherapy to help increase the range of her hip movement.

She even tries putting weight on it every few steps – which is what she needs to do – and keeps trying to do things she isn’t ready for (like the stairs, sigh). We slept the first night on the floor with her, but she seems content to stay snuggled with everyone on the big bed, so my back is super thankful we’ve been able to move her. And no lampshade collar for us because she doesn’t touch her sutures at all (THANK GOD)!

It’ll be about 3-5 weeks before we can try real walks and stairs, and about 5-7 months for us to get a feel for how well it went (which well then determine if we need to do the other side in a year or so).

So that’s about it in the House of Moo this week! ;)

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Half of Me Can Smell What the Rock is Cooking.

March 11, 2013 · 7 comments

This post won’t be super funsies. It’s about my nose. CONTAIN YOUR EXCITEMENTS. 

On the plus side, you’ll totally learn more about your nose than you ever cared to know! ;)

Recently, I’ve been feeling like death. Well, not like death – that’s a touch of an exaggeration – but let’s say I have felt like there was this constant cold I just couldn’t shake. In my nose.

Though I’ve been doing allergy shots for a year to help improve my ability to, say, BREATHE, here in Texas – it felt like what was an improvement was lessening in the past couple of months. As anyone with severe allergies or a raging sinus infection can attest – if you can’t breathe, you can’t sleep. And if you can’t sleep, you develop a host of other ailments,  one of which includes becoming a Real Actual Zombie. Real, Actual, Cranky, Anti-Social, Let’s Just Nap, I Should Avoid Rick Grimes, Zombie Brittney.

In an effort to aid his zombie wife, Sean bought me one of these bad boys (a Snore Pin). Jealous much? It was cheaper and seemed far more forgiving on my sensitive skin than investing our life savings into Breathe Right strips. And being the complete weirdo I am, I marched right over to the mirror and peered up my nostrils.

Don’t judge. You’d do it, too.

And realized my right nostril was completely blocked with tissue.

A doctor’s visit, a CT scan, and a meeting with the chief of ENT surgery at one of our hospitals confirmed that what I have is a very enlarged, very unhappy turbinate. Your nose has two of these blobs o’ tissue in the front of your nasal cavities – one on each side. They do a host of fabulous things, such as keep your nasal passages moist, register airflow to tell your brain you are indeed breathing, regulate air temperature to ensure it’s warm and healthy, filter out the bad things you don’t want in your lungs, etc. As so graciously put in one medical source, they’re required for “functional breathing.”

Sometimes severe allergies, chronic sinus infections, or a deviated septum can cause one or both of these to get a little crazy and get inflamed. Luckily the CT scan showed zero sinus infection or build-up, and luckily for me, I’d undergone surgery in 2007 to correct a nasal fracture that had crushed some interior cartilage that held open my left nostril and shifted my septum. I did the surgery, all $435453 of it, because I struggled to get good airflow from my left side. The surgery never felt like a success, and I had assumed I was one of those 20% who got zero relief from it – and now I know why.

As it turns out, my surgeon had decided to do something that was common (though logically becoming far less common in the last few years): He decided to remove my left turbinate. Entirely. But don’t you need that? Don’t you need it there so it can do all those fabulous things from my earlier paragraph? WHY YES, wise reader, you DO.

So without it, my lone right turbinate has been pulling double duty. Typically, turbinates swell and constrict in shifts to rest. Without a fellow turbinate on the left side, my right turbinate is giant and won’t be getting any smaller. Ever. Because there will never be a happy little nasal mate to let it take a break again. And one of the few options, turbinate reduction, isn’t an option because that’s only possibly safe when… you’ve got two.

So I was miserably diagnosed with Empty Nose Syndrome. It’s pretty magical in the sense that it makes sleeping harder and I always feel out of breathe no matter what I’m doing. It also takes about 4-7 years to arrive to the party, which explained why I was experiencing the issues so many moons after the actual surgery. I knew it was going to be a parade when the chief of surgery made a sad face before delivering the news. ;)  I get to spritz saline spray up my nose 4-6x a day for life to help compensate for the lost moisture and filtration functions, and do what I can to reduce any irritation from allergies (such as my immunotherapy shots and daily Nasonex) to help a smidge, though it’ll always feel like my nose is blocked. It also appears my nose is so tiny that the passages sort of rest closed on each other, so there is new surgery that I can try for a little improved airflow, but my personal jury is out on that at the moment.

We also went through my surgery paperwork and confirmed we were neither charged, nor was it written or discussed anywhere, that I would be undergoing a turbinectomy with my 2008 septoplasty surgery. It was probably a decision he made on the operating table and thought nothing of it, and although we were informed this falls under “medical negligence” for not obtaining patient consent, it’s highly unlikely we’d get anywhere but broke in court because it’s such a common practice. And as there isn’t anything that can be done until stem cell research is more readily accepted/available and I can grow me a fancy new turbinate – I don’t think there is much money would help me with anyway.

Unless it could buy me a unicorn. ::deep thoughts::

So that’s my PSA on anyone considering a nasal surgery for anything – for a septum correction, a nose job – to be sure you bring up NOT touching your fabulous turbinates! :)

This information actually led Sean and I down another path of healthy goodness that I’m pretty darn jazzed to blog about soon — because ho-hum, the ENS is pretty darn depressing if we’re gonna be REAL-real son (Thank you, Chappelle Show), but if there is nothing I can really do about it, the one thing I can do is not let it turn me into Emo Zombie Brittney along the way.

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Even though some of you are pretty thin, you all have fat hearts, and that’s what matters. – Pitch Pefect

February 13, 2013 · 8 comments

Well it’s been a day since I have last posted, no? ;) What’s happened since, oh, January?

I turned thirty. To no one’s surprise, thirty feels an awful lot like the end of twenty-nine, except that I’m pretty darn excited about it. Not so excited that I want to race through growing older and high-five my forties just yet or anything, but in the sense that it feels like that decade where you can at least more convincingly pretend you know what you’re talking about. ;)

We celebrated one year of being Gizmo’s parents. I haven’t really updated on his progress much but he’s doing really well. Drum roll please…. We even eat out of a dog bowl that nobody is holding. Do you know how excited we were to not need to crouch and hold his bowl twice a day? Our knees are overjoyed! ;) Granted, if anything in the house is amiss (was that chair there yesterday? is a book missing from that shelf?!), we sometimes find he decides it’s just too scary to do it, but I want to say that 99% of the time, the little dude eats all by his onesie.

One of my BFFs Rachel came to visit. We moved to Te-jas nearly five years ago, and outside of a single vacation together to WA in the Summer of 2008, I have not seen her (nor many of my good pals) since then… And there is something to be said about how much it warms your soul to have someone who knows your story, values your worth, understands your heart, and appreciates rainbow sprinkles on the same unhealthy level you do come and visit. Rachel is one of those folks who just falls into that “Good People” category, one of those just inherently GOOD folk, and her company revitalized me. That’s so cheesy – especially when all we did was spend the weekend watching Magic Mike and baking the world’s greatest sprinkle cake – but it’s true.

I had a low-key 30th Birthday party. It was actually why she flew out, and we decided to ham it up by making the little theme be PINK and SPRINKLES. (Did anyone else just hear Steel Magnolias? Her colors are pink and pink. My cuh-lahs are blush and bashful). We topped an all-sprinkle cake with glittery birthday numbers, made rainbow-dipped pink champagne flutes serve graham cracker-Oreo cookie-whipped cream-pudding, filled mason jars with frozen strawberries and raspberry lemonade, set out 1950′s striped paper straws  hung a bunch of giant pink paper lanterns around the house, and even went third-grade style and put up some streamers. Oh yeah, I said that, streamers. And then I got to introduce Rachel, The Good Person, to folks in my neighborhood whom also get grouped into that category. Merging CA Good People with TX Good People made me happy.

I’m working on my plan to make 2013 the Year of Compassion. There is a wonderful quote from Diane Von Furstenburg that says, “I didn’t always know what I wanted to do, but I knew the kind of woman I wanted to be.” At the end of the day, when I’ve put in my 9-5 and ran my errands and walked my dogs and tucked myself in, the thing I will find most solace in is knowing that I’m a compassionate person. That I’m not only extending that compassion to other humans, but other animals and the planet itself — and that’s precisely the example I want to set for my future children. I plan to post more on this later, but we’re making those easily changed steps toward embracing a healthier, happier, more compassionate lifestyle. Right now, we’re slowly swapping out things like harsh household cleaners and beauty products with brands that are more ecologically friendly and don’t test on animals (I don’t want wrinkles… but I don’t need a beagle to be skinned and forced to live with a painful rash in a small cage for his entire life just for that sake). Bit by bit, we’ll get there, and be better for it.

What about you guys? How is your 2013 going so far?

 

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Macklemore’s Same Love.

January 12, 2013 · 2 comments

I don’t typically post videos, but this here? A strong and important message.

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Family Visit 2012!

December 24, 2012 · 1 comment

In case you weren’t keeping track (how dare you), it has been nearly five years since I’d last seen my family.

My side of the family are the worst travelers, and between regular life activities and so forth, we’d only made our way back to California once since we moved and they hadn’t yet come out to the Great State (kidding, California is the great state, but I know how much Texans love Texas). We honestly might win the award for Worst at Keeping in Touch, but we love each other all the same!

So, in honor of the fact our fourth nephew was born this year (their first, and the first on my side, though we are aunt and uncle to a total of six now!), we conned them into finally visiting for five days in early December. Being that this year is William’s first Thanksgiving and Christmas, we decided to do a “Faux Christmas” in the middle of the two so that he could spend the actual events with her hubby’s family. I also got to meet my dad’s girlfriend, Vicky, who was such a sweetie pie. Considering my dad has not had much past a date in the seventeen years between when my mother passed away and he met Vicky, it was sort of A Big Deal. ;)

We mostly stayed local and just enjoyed each others’ company, though we did have a BBQ with some of our most favorite people (who just so happen to all also be neighbors), and my dad decided he had so much fun that he couldn’t fathom letting it go another five years. My dad fears travel, ya’ll. FEARS it. So that comment alone made me giddy! Everyone came over with their little ones – ranging from 8 months to 13 years, with the largest chunk in the 2-5 group – and we had a blast. Sean even looked a little gooey at all the family gathering goodness of it all. ;)

We also decided to check out the Gaylord Texan ICE event. They fly in 40 ice sculptors from China, who then carve two million pounds of ice into a holiday theme each year. Narrowed down? You pay too much money, are given a GIANT parka, and are hustled along a pathway too narrow to take decent photos while viewing all the sculptures that are kept at a sweet nine degree temperature. Actually, it was pretty cute and the hotel itself offered tons of picture opportunities and holiday-themed things for kids who were older than William, and it would have helped if anyone in my family had actually seen Madagascar (this year’s theme). Oops. Maybe next year. Yet I could see going down there just to view all the lights and decor annually once we’ve got little ones of our own. Hello, baby fever!

William and me playing Patty Cake or Little Bunny Foo-Foo for the 900th time:

William learning that if you share with one dog, you’ll get stuck sharing with the rest:

Lookin’ sweet in our loan parkas – Sean’s so excited about the nine degree temperature

that he gave himself several chins:

Marty! I didn’t know that, but there was a well-informed toddler in front of me who helped out:

Gloria, Alex, and Melman (thanks again, random toddler!):

Look, some other ice-versions of characters I don’t know:

The Gorton’s Fisherman was there. Oh, no, that’s just my dad (and his super sweet girlfriend, Vicky):

Saint Nicholas:

My sister and a conked out William. He fell asleep in one outfit and woke up wearing a new one (with a hat) —

surrounded by giant zoo characters. Didn’t phase him at all.

Bailey quickly realized that he could reach the high chair – and that William was easily swayed into handing him food (he’s now totally on board with this baby concept):

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