A Very Interesting Day

First, let me give you the postscript to yesterday’s post.

Last night, Matilda and I went out for our normal evening walk around 5:30.  Then I took her for a pre-bedtime outing at 8:30.  I was asleep by 9:30. (Yeah, I know.  That’s pretty early, especially for a Friday night, but I was exhausted.)  She woke me up four times and was quite forceful with her demand to go outside.  Each time I responded by pulling the deepest baritone from my gut that I could muster and gave her a resounding and firm, “No!”.  Then I rolled away from her and tried to go back to sleep.

Around 4:30, she woke me up again.  This time she started walking in circles and wouldn’t take no for an answer.  I decided that she must be serious this time, so I took her outside.  I was right.  She quickly handled her business and ran back in the house.  I wasn’t thrilled to be outside at 4:40 in the morning, but I was happy that she was quick about it.

We’ll see what tonight brings.

This morning’s walk was very interesting.  Tildy tried getting me out of the bed around 6:30, but I refused to move until about 8:30.  While we were strolling, we encountered a woman that we see every once in a while in the morning.  She’s usually accompanied by a man, but this morning, she was alone.  She walks as if she experienced a stroke sometime in her recent past, but over the last year, her gait has gotten better.  As she walked towards us, she announced that she was waiting for a bus.  She had her royal blue bus pass clipped to her shirt in much the same way that a parent might pin a note to a child’s shirt so that the teacher wouldn’t miss it.  Her wet, curly hair, that looks like it once was blond, is now a golden hued gray.  She again announced she was waiting for the bus and it was in that moment I wished I had walked in a different direction.  In the next three minutes, I learned that she has lived in the neighborhood for a couple of years, she is from St. Louis, she came here to be with a guy she met online and had talked to every day for two months before getting on a train to move to here.

The trip took two days.  The train pulled in at 7:40 p.m. that day and I took a cab here.  That trip took 4 hours and it only should’ve taken two.  It was just stupid.  I didn’t know where I was going.  I had never been here before.  I had to pay the cab driver $147.  The train pulled in at exactly 7:40 p.m. and I got here at 11:40 p.m.  It was just stupid.  We’ve been together for two years and eight months.  I don’t know.  Do you count the two months on the phone?  Yeah.  two years and eight months.  I’ve been catching this bus to go to the gym every day that I’ve been here and that’s been two years and six months.  Do your parents live here?  Where are you from?  My parents are divorced and that was stupid.  They divorced in ’78 and dad died in ’82.  I don’t know why they divorced.  It was just stupid.  He died four years later.  It was just stupid.  And then mom died two days after dad’s birthday two years later.  It was just stupid.  Where is the bus?  How long have you lived in this neighborhood?

At that point, Matilda decided that she’d had enough and started pulling me away.  I was never more thankful for her bossy little butt.  She kept talking to me as Tildy and I walked away.  Thankfully, the bus came so I didn’t get pulled into another one-sided conversation.

 

Caution! Wet Spots Ahead.

Yep.  You guessed it.  The incontinence is back and it’s back with a vengeance.  I was getting a little nervous that there might actually be something serious wrong with her until I found some of her medicine “hidden” around the house.  Now I have to watch her eat it to be sure she isn’t stashing it around the house.

Sigh.

A Pintrest Kind of Day(s)

Since Matilda has Addison’s Disease and incontinence, she takes medicine twice a day, every day.  She picks around the pills if I put them in her food, but she takes it willingly if I put it in a snack.  I had been giving her the pill pockets made my Greenies, but they are $9.00 per bag and she goes through a bag in less than a month.  Once I decided to look for a cheaper alternative, I started putting them in cheese.  She loved that, but I think the cheese was starting to give her stomach some issues.  By chance, I came across this recipe on Pintrest.

I was having a lazy afternoon, so I decided to try it.  I didn’t have crunchy peanut butter, so I used the regular peanut butter I had on hand.  Mine didn’t come out as pretty as the picture, but it was the exactly right consistency to neatly hid a pill.  Matilda was hesitant at first, but she ate it and now she looks forward to getting her medicinal treat.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been finding little bugs on Tildy.  I’ve decided that they are fleas and I’m not happy about it.  This is the second year in a row that Frontline Plus has failed me in the month of August.  It might be time to reassess.  Since it is too soon to do another application of Frontline, I again turned to Pintrest for help.  There, I found this DIY flea shampoo.

While I didn’t see bugs floating in the water when I was done, as the recipe said that I would, I also didn’t find any bugs on Tildy when I was done.  The flea dirt was gone too.

Pintrest to the rescue once again.

Both of these ideas came from a list called 38 Unexpectedly Brilliant Tips For Dog. Owners.

Jinx! Buy Me Some Laundry Detergent!

Yesterday, I was reading over last year’s blog posts and realized that I left y’all hanging on the incontinence saga.  I chuckled to myself at the difficulties I had last year and was happy that it was all in the past.

Then this happened last night.

Soaked clear down to the sheet.  To her credit, she did ask me to go around 3:00a.m., but it took me awhile to realize what was going on and to wake up enough to get down the steps and outside.  Once we got there, she was more interested in the smells of the night than actually handling her business.  It took her 15 minutes to find an acceptable spot to pee.  Talk about frustrating!  Then three hours later, at 6:00 this morning, she was begging to go outside again.  As I was rolling out of bed for the second time of the morning, I discovered yet another wet spot.

This is the first accident we’ve had in awhile.  The last series of accidents occurred when a new boyfriend was spending a lot of time here.  Once he was gone, she stopped having accidents.  Not sure what’s causing the problem this time, but I’m thinking I might’ve jinxed myself by laughing at my prior posts on this problem.  Here’s to hoping this was an isolated incident.

The End of the Saga (I Hope)

                                

I just reread a lot of my previous posts and realized that I never updated y’all about the incontinence saga, so here goes.

Tildy has been taking Proin twice a day for about a year and we have had no major issues (knock on wood).  Matilda is about 13 years old now, so I expect her to have an accident every once in awhile.  Now and then, she leaves a little dribble, but it doesn’t happen very often anymore and I couldn’t be happier.

The Saga Continues

Last Friday, I dropped off Tildy at the kennel for a weekend stay.  I updated Kay, the owner of the kennel, about Tildy’s frequent accidents.  She told me that her little dog went through the same thing and it turned out to be renal failure.  Sufficiently scared out of my mind, I called the vet and got an appointment for first thing Monday morning.

When I picked up Tildy on Sunday, Kay told me that they hadn’t noticed anything like the bladder emptying episodes that I had described.  Hmmm….

Sunday night, I was not awakened by a wet spot or a request to go outside.  Something in my gut told me to cancel the appointment, but I ignored that feeling and we went to the vet anyway.

Monday night, no accidents and no requests to go outside.

The vet called with the lab results on Tuesday evening.  A series of tests and $300 later, I’m told that there is nothing wrong with her.  The vet increased her dosage of Proin and told me to keep watch on her.

Tuesday night, no accidents and no requests to go outside.

Last night, the day after receiving the news from the vet, she had an accident and didn’t request to go outside.

I’m thoroughly exhausted, frustrated, and confused.

Pee Pads and Diapers Aren’t Working for Us

I named this blog “The Tildy Spot” for a number of reasons.  First, I thought of it as the spot that you could find out about Tildy…kinda like “the jazz spot around the corner” or “the burger joint down the street”.  I also found myself saying it a lot when I first got her, especially when we were outside.  “C’mon, Tildy.  Find your spot so we can go home.”  She also has spots in the house that she’s identified as hers and of course I refer to them as the Tildy spots.

Over the past few weeks, she’s been leaving spots on the couch and the bed; large urine stained spots.

I tried putting training pads all over the place, but inevitably, she would either move them before she laid down or she would find the one place that wasn’t covered with a pad.

Yesterday, I broke down and bought doggie diapers.

Getting her in one was somewhat of a challenge.  She didn’t appreciate me putting her tail through the hole.  She didn’t like the way they sounded.  She didn’t like the way they constricted her movement.  Here she is after I finally got one on her.  She was not happy with me.

Once we got upstairs for the evening, I had a sense of relief.  I really thought I’d be able to sleep through the night without encountering a puddle and maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t wake me up at zero dark thirty to take her outside.

Those diapers gave me a false sense of security.

Around 2:00 this morning, I caught a whiff of urine and rolled over to find a huge wet spot on my favorite quilt.  I turned my head to find Matilda pawing at me, which is her way of asking to go outside.  As I got up to get dressed, I found a dry, completely intact diaper at the foot of the bed.  She must be some sort of Houdini.

Pee pads and diapers aren’t working for us.

“This is so you won’t pee on me. One, two, three!”

Matilda is getting old.  The best estimates have her between 77 and 84 dog years old. (That’s between 11 and 12 people years.)  In the past couple of years, we have started to battle incontinence.  It started with little dribble drops on the sofa while watching television.  Then we started have minor “oops” moments while settling in for the evening.  That’s when the vet prescribed Proin drops to help her with bladder control.  At first it was a struggle getting her to take the drops.  Eventually we got into a good habit of taking the drops after going for a walk.  But the only way she would open her mouth for the drops is if I sing-songingly said, “This is so you won’t pee on me.  One, two, three!”

Every now and again, I would go stretches without giving her the medicine and she would do well without it.  But then the dribbles would start again, so we would start back up with, “This is so you won’t pee on me.  One, two, three!”.

When the pharmaceutical company stopped manufacturing the drops we had a slight problem.  Matilda refused to take the tablets for quite awhile.  Once I figured out that she would eat anything that was covered in peanut butter, we were back on track.

We recently went through a very long successful stretch without the medicine, but incontinence came back with a vengeance.  This time, there were no dribbles or “oops”.  This time, she emptied her bladder three times in one night, while she was sleeping…on my bed.  What’s worse is that right before going to bed that night, I had decided to change my sheets.  After the third accident, I was praying that there would be no more because I had no more clean sheets.  During that same night, she woke me up three separate times and asked to go outside.  Two of the three times, she squatted for almost a minute.  The third time, we smelled the presence of a skunk, so she decided that she wouldn’t handle her business at that time…which was 4:30 a.m.  But at 5:50 a.m., five minutes before my alarm clock sounded, I rolled over to find a guilty face staring back at me.  Yes, another wet spot in the bed.

We’re back to medicinal peanut butter treats, but we’re still having small incidents.

Matilda is getting old.  Sigh…