Working from Home with Hudson

Hudson continued to whine throughout the day.  I gave him a massage every couple of hours.  I’m sure his muscles start to ache from always lying in the same position to avoid putting pressure on his sutures.  Hudson insisted that he needed to be touching me at all times.  I ended up spending most of the day working on my laptop lying next to him on the air mattress, or sitting next to him on the floor.  The kind of funny thing is that while he wanted to be touching me, he didn’t want attention.  If I tried to cuddle or pet him, he’d turn away.  I think he wanted the comfort of knowing I was nearby, but didn’t have the patience to actually put up with me. J

I was able to get him to eat about a ½ cup of food in the morning, but that was all.  (To put that in perspective, he usually eats 2 ½ cups twice per day.)  He was also uninterested in his Pill Pockets, so I ended up having to open his mouth and put them in the back of his throat.  If you want to feel bad about yourself for a while, try force feeding an amputee his pills.  I was given reproachful looks from his big brown eyes for the next twenty minutes.

I’ve had a few people ask me how his brother and sister are handling this whole mess.  Porter is going quietly crazy.  Each time Hudson crys, Porter gets wound up and stresses.  He doesn’t know how to react when his alpha is in pain.  He’s so anxious that simple directions are flustering him.  I asked him to “go pillow” (lay on his pet cot with an orthopedic pillow on it.)  He kept turning in one direction, and then the other as though he had no idea what to do.  Porter is also insisting that he needs to be touching me, so he can frequently be found on the floor next to the air mattress, nuzzling my foot or leg.

Lexi, meanwhile, is another story altogether.  Initially, I would have said that she didn’t care one way or the other.  She doesn’t seem too concerned about his whines and isn’t terribly interested in what he’s doing.  She cuddled him for a short time this afternoon, but I got the impression that it was more of a bid for my attention, then any genuine desire to cuddle him.  This evening was the turning point.  Lexi began getting into trouble and acting out for attention.  She’s a pain in the butt at the best of times, but there are some bad habits that we’ve broken her of.  They are suddenly back.  She pulled a book off the shelf and started shredding the pages.  She started climbing on furniture again.  (Bassets can climb like you would not believe.  Those little t-rex arms don’t limit them at all, thanks to their devious little minds.)  For dinner, I was making Cheesy Salsa Mini Meatloaves.  In essence, it’s meatloaf baked in cupcake pans.  It’s delicious.  Hudson started whining in the way that signals that he needs to go outside, so I pushed the pan to the back of the stove and took him out.  Upon our return, we found that Lexi had managed to push a chair over to the counter, climb up on it, then onto the counter, then walked over to the top of the stove and ate half of the meatloaves.  That’s about a ½ lb of hamburger, a cup of salsa, a cup of cheese and half a raw egg.  So…I had cereal for dinner and Tony got a couple of the untouched meatloaves.

Dakota, my 12 year old Aussie Shepherd/Blue Heeler mix is also staying with us.  It was an unfortunate coincidence that my parents were going out of town just as Hudson was being diagnosed.  Dakota is incredibly timid and has absolutely no interest in being around my dogs.  That carried through to Hudson’s arrival home.  She avoids him like the plague, except when I’m tempting him to eat.  She arrives to beg, then disappears when we’re done.  When startled, she's like a deer on ice.  Unfortunately, it's far too easy to startle her.  Walking in her direction is enough to cause the panic.  She's tries to move, and all her legs are going, but seem to be going in different directions, so she gets nowhere.  Trying to maneuver a temporarily disabled Dane through the kitchen when she has one of her freak outs is not easy.  I feel awful for her.  I can't imagine a life of fear like she has.

One of the hardest parts of this whole experience is that we just finished landscaping the backyard.  They finished laying the sod on Monday, so we can’t walk on it for four weeks.  Dakota and Lexi are fine with pottying in the front yard, but Hudson and Porter can’t seem to figure out that it’s okay.  Porter has to be taken for 20 minute walks before he’ll go, and even then, it seems to be luck of the draw.  Hudson will only go in a particular spot in the backyard….that was just sodded.  Hudson can’t be walked for twenty minutes, so that’s not an option.  I took him out to the front yard to potty six times today.  He didn’t go once.  I took him to his spot in the backyard once and he went forever.  (Then I had to turn the hose on and drown the spot in hopes that it wouldn’t kill the sod.)