Beloved Dog, The Reprise – Or, In Which I Take Spoiling My Dog To A Whole New Level

Tags

diet, dogs, home cooked diet, home made dog food, IBD, pancreatitis, recipe, ultrasound

Some of you may remember that a year and a half ago, I threw myself into a panic over Beloved Dog. Some routine bloodwork based on my paranoid suspicions revealed that he tested positive for pancreatitis, despite having none of the symptoms of it.

I put him on a low fat diet, rechecked him a month later, and he STILL tested positive. So I sent the blood to the lab for a more detailed answer. I wanted to know HOW positive.

Well, apparently a normal Spec CPL number is between 0 and 200. Over 200 is borderline. Over 400 is definitive. Beloved Dog was at 600.

Cue panic and tests.

Well, ultrasound showed pretty much nothing. Ditto when, a month later, Beloved Dog began urinating tea brown liquid. A little thickening of the bladder, some funny nodules on the spleen that, when tested, turned out to be nothing significant.

So, on the advice of the ultrasound vet, I dismissed it as nothing. He said that the spec CPL test is wrong sometimes.

Just to be sure, I put Beloved Dog on an extremely low fat diet. But his weight melted off and he got skinny as hell. And I’ve always kept him pretty lean to begin with, so we’re talking prominent ribs, sticky-outy spine, etc.

I changed his food to a more moderate level of fat and simply kept him away from fatty treats.

And he seems to have been doing fine.

It’s just the little things:

The fact that he has taken to having bowel movements in the house. Even if he pooped outside earlier that day. Several times.

He isn’t cuddly.

I mean, he was never a CUDDLY dog. Not the way a Lab or a Pug might treat you like their personal cushion. But he liked to lean up against you, It seems like over the last few years that has faded away. Now he wants to curl up in a corner and for you to leave him the f*** alone.

Behold, my doggy fortress of solitude

Then there’s the abdomen thing.

Whenever a dog comes in for an exam, vets always palpate the abdomen. Sometimes if there’s a cancer or something in there they can feel it, and how well the dog tolerates it can tell them if his stomach hurts or not.

That test doesn’t work on Beloved Dog, because he always grunts and hunches if you touch his belly. I dismissed it as a mannerism, until the pancreatitis test last year. Now I’m not sure. Humans with pancreatitis report it as excruciatingly painful, even in chronic form.

Anyway, I just left the matter to rest. After all, he SEEMS fine. Likes to run, loves to eat. Gets into mischief occasionally. Hell, compared to a lot of the fat, greying, stiff-limbed 9 year old dogs I see at my clinic, he seems remarkably youthful.

Then, on Sunday, I fed him a piece of lean steak leftover from Owl’s bowl. I was thinking “to hell with the pancreatitis thing. He’s been fine for a year. There’s no fat on this piece, anyway.”

My nose woke me up at 6 the next morning. We pulled back the closet door and nearly wept. Messy, stinky poop everywhere and judging from Beloved Dog’s hunched and guilty posture, he wasn’t done. I shoved him out in the yard for a good hour.

Then I brought him into work.

Physical exam was about the same – tense abdomen, grunts when palpated, otherwise nothing unusual noted. I did some repeat blood work, and his organ function looked the same as last year.

In fact, strangely similar. His cholesterol was up a bit last year, which often doesn’t mean much. Except a year later, despite having eaten nothing for 12 hours, his cholesterol was, if anything, higher than last year.

So I ran another Spec CPL, to see how his probably-false-positive for pancreatitis was coming along. Now it was 764, instead of 600. I asked the lab to add on a check of his amylase and lipase – two enzymes secreted by the pancreas as well as several other organs during gastronomic upset. They were elevated, too.

The Girl Diet

Tags

baby, boys, diet, gender, gender selection, gender swaying, girls, low calorie, pregnancy, sex ratio

PH and I need to have a girl next time because we can’t work out a boy name. We’ve vetoed each other’s favourites (with the exception of Owl’s name, a favourite of mine that PH didn’t mind) and cautiously accepted as “maybes” some other suggestions.

Girl names are easier.

We worked out several possible girl names as well as Owl’s name before we even got engaged. We know the name of our future girl.

So this time, we’re going to try to have a girl.

When I found out that Owl was a boy, I had a lot of mixed emotions. On the one hand, I have always wanted a boy. Whenever I dreamed of babies, they were boys. I LOVE little boys. I’m not so hot on little girls. They’re manipulative and often shallow and obsessed with their Barbies’ hair.

So I was glad I was getting my boy.

But PH wanted a girl. PH isn’t big on men in general. He likes and admires all things female.

So I was concerned that he was disappointed.

He has never expressed any disappointment – he loved Owl from the moment he laid eyes on him – but he has teased me about the fact that I got my boy.

“Hey, it’s your sperm that determines the gender,” I would say defensively.

“I gave you millions of girl sperms! You picked THIS one!”

It was all a big joke, but I got hired on Elance to write a series of articles about selecting your baby’s gender earlier this year and I learned a few things:

1. While the gender is in fact determined by the man’s sperm, the woman’s body has final say on which gender it produces.

2. Boys are slightly more common than girls, 51% of babies being boys.

3. The world is full of myths about timing your intercourse to have a certain gender, assuming certain positions etc and all of this is completely unsubstantiated by modern science.

4. Women (and other female mammals) who are stressed, eating low fat or low calorie diets, or living in crowded situations, tend to de-select males, and start producing more females. The effect can be as much as 60-80% females born over males. Women who eat high calorie diets experience the opposite – 60% more males than females.

The idea is that if resources are low, females are a better bet. We only need ONE male to repopulate the world, but we need a lot more women. Also, since male babies require more calories to make, a female is easier to put together if there isn’t a lot of food to go around.

It’s called the Trivers-Willard hypothesis, and there seems to be a lot of research to back it up. 

Male blastocysts also appear to be less hardy – they don’t absorb sugar as well from the uterine environment and are less likely to survive to implant in the uterine wall if the mother’s blood sugars aren’t stable.

The difference is such that just skipping breakfast can affect your chances of having a boy.

So…. guess what I’m doing?

I’m back on My Fitness Pal, logging my calories, and I’m skipping breakfast.

I’m not cutting back on calories dramatically. After all, if a woman is starving she’s not likely to conceive at all, and honestly a second boy would not be the end of the world. PH would love him and still consider our family complete.

But I would like a girl, too. First, I’ve done the boy thing and now I’d like to try the girl thing. Second, while I’m not big on little girls, I would like to have a grown daughter some day.

Plus I just like experimenting with science, especially science that motivates me to lose weight.

So I’m on a restricted, but not unreasonable, low calorie diet and skipping breakfast.

Que sera, sera.

At least I can tell PH that I tried!

…And yes, I will stop the low calorie diet the moment that second line forms on the pregnancy test.

Fat For Thought, Or, In Which I Get Sarcastic About People Who Defend Fat-Shaming

Tags

bullying, children, concern troll, cyber bullying, diet, examples, exercise, fat, fat shaming, fitness, health, jennifer livingston, lifestyle, morality, news anchor, obesity, role models

Everyone’s talking about that overweight anchorwoman, Jennifer Livingston, who defended herself against a concern troll who emailed her.

Surely you don’t consider yourself a suitable example for this community’s young people, girls in particular. Obesity is one of the worst choices a person can make and one of the most dangerous habits to maintain. I leave you this note hoping that you’ll reconsider your responsibility as a local public personality to present and promote a healthy lifestyle.

Livingston called him out on-air and pointed out that fat people KNOW they are fat and don’t need it pointed out by random strangers, and asked him if he really thought that his rudeness set any better of an example.

So now the world is full of people applauding this woman for standing up for herself, while others go “but he’s right, you know.”

I had to listen to it on the radio this morning. The male DJ was totally behind Livingston, while the female DJ kept saying “yeah, but he had a point. I mean, would it be okay to have a fat children’s show host?”

It was all very Helen Lovejoy.

Won’t someone PLEASE think of the children?

Sure, Jennifer Livingston wasn’t smoking on tv, or guzzling potato chips while delivering local news, but she did commit the fairly sizeable (pun intended) crime of BEING FAT PUBLICLY.

Fat people, just by going on tv, looking fat, are telling our kids that it’s okay to look different from the anorexic models in the fashion magazines.

And we don’t want THAT, do we?

And, the woman DJ argued, what is wrong with a little concern trolling now and then? As she and many commenters on the Youtube clip point out:

a) The concern troll emailed her in a private email, so it’s not like he was mean to her in public, which is the important thing.

b) The email was written politely and didn’t use the word “fat”.

c) The emailer was just trying to help.

After all, aren’t we all morally obligated to offer help to someone who walks around being fat all the time?

a) Maybe they don’t know they’re fat, and need someone to tell them. It is entirely possible that they haven’t glanced in a mirror, looked down, or checked the size of their clothes in years.

b) If you don’t actually use the terms “fat”, “pig-like” or “tub o’ lard”, and as long as it is phrased politely, it is completely socially appropriate to go up to a stranger and suggest they reconsider their physical flaws.

c) Won’t someone PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?

There’s just a couple teeny little points, though, that I would like to add as fat-for-thought to the people who make these delightfully smug little arguments.