Thoughtful

Here's a quickie layout of my girl Paige again.  We were at a local park on Tuesday night, and I managed to catch some pretty sweet pictures of the girls there.  This was a nice contemplative picture of Paige looking at some wildflowers she'd found.  Journaling reads:  "Over the course of this summer, I’ve noticed Paige being more thoughtful.. She’s been a bigger help around the house. One night while I was busy doing the “important business” of updating my blog, she even cleaned the whole kitchen for me! When I’ve asked her to do something, her attitude has been better too. What a wonderful change! I’m so proud of her!
July 12, 2011

This collection is Basic Grey's "Out of Print" line.  There are some really great patterns in that line!

 Have a great Thursday!  :)

Fix You. . .

We've gone through a recent health crisis with our beloved 12 1/2 year old German Springer Spaniel, Alex.  It was literally overnight that he went from his usual happy self (albeit stiff, as a 12 1/2 year old with arthritis will be) to a dog we couldn't even recognize as ours.  He couldn't get up off the floor without help.  He completely stopped eating.  He went from drinking 3-4 bowls of water a day to maybe 2/3 of a bowl.  He stopped following us around, and even stopped wagging his tail when we came into the room.  We thought the end had come.  We prepared our daughters, as best we could, to say good-bye, and we took him to the vet. 

What we didn't know, was that our regular vet was on vacation, and we had a guest vet.  This vet didn't seem overally worried at what was catastrophic to us.  Of course, it didn't help that Alex got pumped up with adrenaline over the car ride and the vet office and started acting a little more spunky.  He did blood work and decided to give Alex a joint medication and some pain meds and sent us home.  This was on Thursday.

By Saturday morning, Alex was not improving and was continuing to decline, so we took him to another local veternarian.  This doctor did a chest x-ray, more blood work (another $100 for the same thing done only 2 days before!), and recommended we admit Alex to their hospital over Fourth of July weekend.  The money was really adding up.  We didn't feel like we could leave him there, so they gave him an i.v. of fluids and antibiotics and recommended we do further testing.

Tuesday morning, we called our regular vet who was thankfully back from his vacation, and after looking over all of the results, he recommended we do that same test.  So, Wednesday, we took Alex in for yet more blood work and waited for the results.  Of course, they came back negative.

We are now down a substantial amount of money, and we still have absolutely no idea what is wrong with Alex.  They now want to do a stomach x-ray and more blood work to see if he has a tick disease....

Only a few days before this whole nightmare started, I downloaded Coldplay's song "Fix You" onto my ipod.  Through the tears, this song spoke to me.  The lyrics felt so right for where we are right now.  We honestly do not know how to fix him.  In the meantime, it is so hard to watch him be so different from his normal self.  He's currently on prednisone, which has spunked him up a little bit.  But our fur baby's future just feels so unclear...

If you've stuck with me through this long novel, thank you.  If you're a pet owner, or ever have been, you probably understand what we are going through.  A few days into this, I took this picture of Alex as he laid on our floor, basically unresponsive, one day. 

I had to use this picture to make a layout.  My hope was it would help me process the feelings...

The tag underneath has hidden journaling, and the lyrics are the ones from the song, "Fix You", that really hit me every time I listen to it.  Thanks for reading...
Wendy