Update on Old Man Harry and Other Health Matters

Harry is almost back to where he was before the vestibular nerve incident. His head tilt is almost gone, and I only notice it in certain contexts now. One lingering effect is a persistent rear end weakness, and he is dragging one of his feet. Since I noticed symptoms of increasing rear end weakness many months ago, this could simply be the progression of that, and unrelated to the vestibular thing. Still, it's a worry although there's nothing to be done about it.

He can still jump up on the couch unassisted (most days) although he is not allowed to jump on and off the bed anymore. And he needs a bit of help getting outside in the mornings. It is easier to carry him outside since the two steps down are proving to be a bit too challenging.

He can't wait to go for his hour-long walk every morning, rain or shine. My dogs now have fleece-lined raincoats for those damp, cold mornings. It was 41 F and raining yesterday at 7am!

And Harry is always the one to initiate a game of tug and fetch with the toys. If he's decided it's time to play, he won't settle until we play.

He's more frail than he was six months ago but he's still got a lot of heart and joie de vivre. He will be 15 years old in August.

Shortly after we got here, Azza developed a horrendous case of flaky skin. It was really getting gross. She didn't act like it was itchy but brushing her would produce a snow storm of flakes, and she left a trail of flakes everywhere she went.

Since it didn't seem to be an allergic reaction, I thought it might be diet related. (By no means can I rule out an environmental cause since just about every plant out here is blooming and spewing some sort of reproductive stuff at the moment. She just didn't have any of the usual symptoms you might associate with a histamine reaction.)

I was giving her vitamin E but I decided to increase that to six 1000 IU capsules a day (three with each meal). Then I noticed that Harry's joint supplement had flaxseed as the first ingredient so I added that to her food as well. And after some more thought, I realized that the homemade diet I had been feeding them in Dhahran had a lot more protein than she's been getting so I upped the protein content of her food.

The flakes disappeared in about three days. SInce I made all of these changes at the same time, I don't know which one helped! Bad experimental design but the outcome was good. I'll have to back them out one at a time to sort it out.