Cut & Paste

I'm not sure if this title is appropo - but the Queen (Kinsey) would think so! She got cut big time last week - spayed and had her stomach tacked. This is not a plastic surgery procedure but rather a means to protect her from a very fatal and fairly common complication of gastric bloat called gastric torsion. Which basically means, sometimes a dog's stomach fills with air and then flips over or rotates (torsion) which in turn cuts off the circulation to the stomach, intestines and even sometimes the spleen. The stomach tack procedure fastens her stomach in place - it can't prevent the bloat (the filling with air part) but hopefully will prevent the flipping over part.
So anyway she's been milking this post-surgical recovery phase for all it's worth and it's working - she's getting pampered big time. She does the "Oh woe is me" bit very well anyway, but I was really worried. For some reason, a significant percentage of Danes die during or after surgery - including so-called "routine" surgeries like a spay. I'm sure it's still a small percentage, after all people don't normally email everyone they know to say "my dog got spayed and she's fine" but it's a large enough percentage that the parent club Great Dane Club of America has seen fit to form special surgical guidelines for Great Danes.

The other part of the "cut and paste" topic that applies is me coping with the fact that our hard drive went toes up last month and I'm trying to recover or reassemble the documents that weren't properly backed up (shame, shame!!). I'm teaching a Rally class this summer for the third year and I'm having to recreate some of the handouts for that. Oh, joy!!

On a more fun topic, we went to a Dane specialty near Austin over Memorial Day weekend and it went very well. We took 4 dogs which makes it sort of a trial run for the National specialty this October. We had 3 of Kinsey's pups with us, and a fourth pup was there too so we got some family pictures. It was the pups' first stay in a hotel and they did great!! It's always exciting traveling with puppies...especially when they each weigh over 100 pounds!!

Left to right: Keeper, Teddy, Gus and Topper.