Reactive Proactivity?

Devastation is what I felt when I left the vet clinic on Friday. Complete and utter devastation.

I've tried to learn so much since Friday, I think my brain might explode. It certainly doesn't all fit, but that's what saving emails is for I guess.

A couple wonderful people with some great resources have been so, so helpful. From listening to me cry and whine about the situation, to helping me dig for information about how I can help to make Buzz's body functioning better, for the short or long term.

We want to be able to spend time at the beach this summer.

A lot of it is jumbled still but here's what our tentative plan is for now.

• More Tripe. Tripe is a great protein source that's low in Phosphorus.
• Pepcid. Apparently not-fully-functioning kidneys cause excessive acid build up in the stomach and that can cause it's own issues.
• Antibiotics. Just in case. (We ran a 4DX today and it was all negative.)
• Azodyl.
• At first I panicked about the price of the Azodyl. It's a temperature sensitive supplement that's expensive to begin with. All of the websites I looked at initially either didn't ship it cold (thereby rendering it useless), or it was absolutely cost prohibitive--$100+ per month. I've gotten as far as finding it for about $65 per month, which is still quite high. I'm going to continue to look around for that one.
• And I heard today that Adequan is back in production... we will all be relieved when it's readily available again.

Oh, and we've all decided that a diet high in ice cream is necessary. He's celebrated his birthday three times in the last 10 days. He quite likes ice cream by now.

I've been looking through pictures and videos today. Here's a very old (2008!) agility video.
Buzz NADAC Regular

A Tough Day

Today was gorgeous. We woke up to the sun shining, not a drop of rain anywhere, and we headed to Wisconsin.

Bailey shows off the beautiful weather.

Unfortunately, our trip to WI was already scheduled because Buzz hasn't been acting quite normally. He's been drinking a lot more water and urinating a lot more. Some days he's so full of water he can barely make it outside before he has to pee, a lot.

After running bloodwork and such, I heard what I expected. Which happened to be the exact opposite of what I wanted. Buzz is in early stage kidney failure and it's likely that he's bleeding internally, from somewhere.

So we packed up and took ourselves to the funny farm. A ton of thoughts ran through my head and my emotions ran rampant. I'd be lying if I said I'm okay now, but at least I'm settled. We thoroughly enjoyed a couple hours at the farm, sniffing stuff outside and I even let him eat all the nasty other-animal poop he could find.

Yeah, he was happily eating some kind of poop here!

The only thing I know is that today is not his day to go. It might be tomorrow, it might be next week, and it might even be months from now. I'm trying to be okay with that and realize that all that matters to him is being happy. So we ate ice cream, french fries, and a hamburger on our way back to Burnsville today. Buzz approved whole-heartedly!

Good boy, Buzz. Good boy.