Only one more week until our next trial! We only trial about once a month so I am ALWAYS excited to get my agility fix, every time :) To put an interesting spin on things though, I severely sprained my ankle almost 3 weeks ago and have been hobbling around on crutches until the past couple of days. Since getting off the crutches I've slowly regained the ability to walk more or less normal with simply a noticeable limp. Yesterday I attempted to "run" for the first time just to see where we were with things and it was pretty pathetic actually, lol! I think I would've made my lap faster had I simply just walked around the room and I'm fairly certain I resembled someone missing one of their feet ;) Needless to say I'm not sure I'll be ready to run a course next weekend but we're still going to go and have fun. I figure Doodle and I can practice her distance skills (though not the fastest when working independently Doodle does have pretty awesome distance on her) but I have some great friends who have offered to run my Tess if I'm not up to it by then. Tess really requires someone who can move with her and support her around the course, and distance work has never been our friend due to her lower self confidence levels and my apparent lack of ability to support her properly from a distance. Thanking God for great friends! Agility has introduced me to some pretty amazing people :)
This will also be Tess' second trial jumping at 24" which is quite exciting, but also makes me a little nervous as she's also in the process of getting weaned off her Prednisone. You see, after reviewing Tess' bloodwork numbers the Veterinarian Specialist isn't convinced she has Atypical Addisons but rather possibly something along the lines of Irritable Bowel Disease. Only way to know for sure is to wean her off the Prednisone in order to do more testing to see if she should actually be left on the Prednisone or not... This only worries me as I guess I'm afraid I'll find that Tess might revert back to the dog who caves under the pressure of the ring and completely shuts down. Before we knew anything was going on with her Tess had always been a little stressy in the ring, but nothing I wouldn't expect from a young dog with her perfectionist personality. However in late May, I believe, she began actually shutting down in the ring. I couldn't find that spark in her eye, there was no enthusiasm to tap into, she'd slowly lope after me, skipping jumps and barely able to baby step her way through the weave poles. Then she began messing in the ring in more runs than not and I was at a loss. Good news is that over that weekend in an attempt to "empty her out" I had her outside playing fetch when I noticed her gums went extremely pale and her tongue had turned very cool, nearly cold, to the touch. We had only been fetching a couple of minutes and it was about 80 degrees or so. Up until then I didn't know if we were looking at a Chiro issue or simply a stressy dog issue (not used to dealing with ring stress as Doodle just has fun chasing me and barking her way through the course) but at this point I was worried and made an appointment with our vet to get her in for a checkup and bloodwork. Everything tested out fine except for a few things that suggested possibly Addisons. By the end of all our testing I was actually to the point of hoping it was Addisons so that at least we had an answer and something to work with. We ran the ATCH test which should have given us our answer yet the results came back inconclusive as her baseline cortisol levels were low like an Addisons dog yet after being given the steroid her numbers jumped to just below where a normal dog would be. With this, our vet had us start her on Prednisone as a "test and see how she responds" and suddenly I had my old dog back!! She's happy and confident in the ring, she isn't stressing like she was and I was ecstatic! However her pale gums issue when she gets involved with intense activity did not resolve so our vet referred us on to the Specialist for further testing. And here we are now. The specialist wasn't hardly concerned about the gums at all, but aren't that impressed with her numbers either saying they came to just under the average normal dog's number so it being an average means a little higher/lower is within reason. So now we're looking at getting yet another ATCH test done after she's been weaned off the Prednisone for long enough and until then we're exploring the possibility of IBD (while hoping to avoid the need to perform the extremely invasive surgery and thousands of dollars it will cost to diagnose it)...
So I guess we'll see how Tess handles this next trial since she'll be on only half the dose of her Prednisone and I'll be watching, ready to pull her if it starts looking like that will be best. And we'll also see how my foot holds up to "running" on the dirt arena... Doodle might be my only point of sanity, though she's not going to appreciate having to hold a startline again, it's only been a couple years since we dropped it to have a running start instead ;) but some odd agility is better than no agility at all :) Need my agility fix!
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