Archie: Progress Report

I'm pleased to report that Archie's "brain surgery" was a success! At the time, he was deep into a period of hormone surges, so the sudden removal of those hormones resulted in equally rapid changes in his behavior. It only took about 72 hours before I started seeing big differences, although to be fair, he was drugged to the gills on the good shit for the first 24 hours of that. 

The two changes that would be obvious to even outside observers were these: he no longer had his nose glued to the nether parts of any girl dog within a meter, and when he peed outside, he was completely emptying his bladder instead of placing 2 or 3 perfunctory drops on the fence, saving it all for marking inside the house. Just as quickly, I was able to relax all of the "monitor Archie" tactics I had put into place in an attempt to change his behavior. Most importantly, he is now left free in the house with the girls when I shower. This doesn't mean that hijinks don't ensue when the Eye of Sauron isn't on him, but they are the normal sort of playful dog antics that my house is well proofed against. Everyone is much happier with this new state of affairs. 

One unexpected consequence is that I now regularly brush Archie's teeth. I brush Mimi's teeth every other day or so. When she wanders into the bathroom after I get out of the shower, I know that she wants her teeth brushed. It's been this way for quite a long time, something that she started doing even back when we lived in Saudi Arabia. I keep the dog toothbrushes and tooth gel in a plastic container on the bathroom counter, always at the ready. Archie started following her into the bathroom and watched the procedure with great interest. After smearing some gel over his gums for a week, I decided it was time to jump right in with the brushing (each dog has their own toothbrush). And now when I pull back the shower curtain, I am often greeted by both terriers jostling for position to get their teeth brushed first. 

His performance in agility class has also accelerated noticeably, drawing appreciative comments from the instructor and my classmates. Right now, I'm the weak link in that chain. He's blazing fast, far faster than any fox terrier I've had in the ring, and very responsive. I'm old, slow, and fat. But I've mentioned that his instructor teaches a particular style of agility that emphasizes distance handling and independent performance from the dog. So my job is not necessarily to keep up with him--I can't--but to give him information at the right time and with the right inflection. That last bit is kind of important. If I get too excited, too loud, too flailing, Archie gets too high to perform. If I remain calm, controlled, and quiet, he does much better. He loves to run flat out but he's simply amazing on the tight, technical stuff. 

Many dogs suck into tunnels like they are pulled in by invisible forces. I've learned that, most surprisingly, Archie is a weave-sucker. Many of his early weave problems, such as lifting his head around pole 4 then popping out and hopping into the air at the last pole, have completely disappeared. He drives through the weaves like he's a drill bit. It's quite amazing to see this in a novice dog. 

His first agility trial is coming up in 10 days. I have no idea what he will do when turned loose in that new space. I hope he decides to do some agility with me. I've been renting our practice facility for extra hours to work on AKC-style sequences with him and so far, he takes everything I throw at him in stride.

Diary of A Second-Year Vet Student: Finals Week Is An Endurance Event

Finals week of the fall term. Five comprehensive finals, one per day. It is so, so much worse than that short little sentence makes it sound. Surviving this week will take a fiendish combination of physical and mental endurance. But there's no sag wagon or friendly people handing out cups of water by the side of the road.

I was smart and kept up a constant level of studying throughout the term. And I preloaded my studying over the weekend, working on material for the first three exams. 

The amount of studying we are doing is starting to wear us all down. We passed the halfway point today. Even so, we can't rest, there is no rest for the wicked or weary. The most difficult exam will be tomorrow morning. There's no time to reflect on the exam we take each morning, no time to catch our breath. We must immediately begin studying for the next one.

While I get that all this studying can make it difficult to maintain a normal routine, and I will freely admit that I am not getting enough sleep, some of my classmates continue to dismay me with their apparent inability to organize their lives on even the most basic levels. Half a dozen of them appear to be sleeping in the vet school library at night. They have been wearing the same clothes for three, maybe four days now, walking around the building in what appear to be pajamas, wrapped in blankets. I just do not understand this. It smacks of a helplessness or fecklessness that is not professional. Maybe they think they are being edgy and cool ("look at me, I'm sleeping in the library!") but I think they are just sort of pathetic.

I am studying just as many hours as they are, but I have somehow managed to continue to cook real food every day, shower every morning, put on clean clothes that are different from those that I wore the day before, feed and play with my dogs, take Archie to class (he was a superstar! brain surgery a success!), do laundry, put gas in my car...you get the idea.

Archie's Naughty Bits

Yep, this is exactly what you think it is.

I was fully committed to leaving Archie intact until and unless problems arose. Problems arose so the decision was made: Archie’s naughty bits had to go.

I gave Archie a decent interval of time in which to sort out the signals that his naughty bits were sending to his brain. But he started marking in the house, a behavior that is extremely difficult to stop once it starts. And his obsession with girl dogs was interfering with his ability to play agility. I tried bribes, baby gates to block his access to favorite marking spots, crating when I wasn’t able to watch him, but none of these things were able to compete with his hormonal urges.

Basically, Archie turned into a 12-year-old boy who has seen real tits for the first time.

He is now 14 months of age so he has reached his adult height and the growth plates in his long bones are closed (this would not likely be the case for a larger breed of dog; the growth plates could remain active until well after 18 months of age). Even though it has not been definitively proven that early neutering affects growth, I think it is moot for Archie at this age. But neutering him now will certainly alter his behavior.

My friend Kathryn, the CVT who I worked with a couple of summers ago in the emergency clinic, arranged for me and my classmate McKenna to bring Archie in to the clinic on Monday night. That is usually a very slow night in the clinic and the doctor on duty graciously agreed to let us scrub in and help. 

A routine surgery that would have taken less time to complete than it took to prepare Archie for it stretched out to nearly half an hour as the doc walked McKenna and me through the minutiae of every step. She and I each got to tie some suture knots around the spermatic cords and we each snipped a testicle once the tying off was complete. It was, not surprisingly, a fumble-fest as we tried to sort out the unfamiliar tools and maintain a sterile field.

Most animals given the induction and anesthetic drugs that Archie received take anywhere from a few to 20 minutes to wake up once the inhalant anesthetic gas is turned off. Archie was trying to get off the surgery table in less than two minutes! It was a surprised rush to get his breathing tube out. I was telling a friend in class about this, and she said, “Well, he doesn’t have an ounce of fat on him.” I laughed and said, “Yeah, Archie’s volume of distribution is Archie!” Then I paused and said, “Sadly, I think I just made a pharmacology joke.” We both laughed sadly.

(The volume of distribution is a calculated value describing the theoretical distribution of a drug in an animal. It is usually a much larger volume than the animal itself. My joke played off her comment about Archie having no fat. It’s a really funny joke if you are a second-year vet student taking pharmacology. It’s not funny at all to anyone else on the planet.)

Archie was sent home with some nice drugs and I kept him sedated for two days. He spent the first 24 hours sleeping it off but starting Tuesday night, he started trying to get Azza to wrestle and trying desperately to get me to play fetch. I finally relented and played some toy games Wednesday morning and he was very happy at the return to our normal routine. I figured he didn’t need any more drugs by then. Today (Saturday), he was high as a kite but naturally so, full of life and joy, zooming laps around the living room without touching the floor.

Archie also proved to be fairly sensible for a fox terrier. The cone that he would have had to wear to prevent that long nose from reaching his incision was enormous and it stressed him a lot to have it on. So I decided: no cone. He’s not bothered his incision site other than a few tentative sniffs and licks.

Even though it might take a couple of weeks for his system to completely recalibrate to his new testicle-less state, I’ve already seen some subtle changes in his behavior. And not one marking incident since Monday.

Archie and The "Spread" Jumps

Archie's agility instructor only competes in NADAC. I intend to take Archie mainly to AKC agility events. So what's the difference? Jumps may be replaced with hoops which sit directly on the ground; the dog runs through them with no jumping required. NADAC doesn't use the teeter. And NADAC doesn't use the spread jumps: the double jump, triple jump, and broad jump. 

NADAC also has a lot of games where distance handling is required. Archie has some mad distance skills for a novice dog. Many novice dogs have to be babied all the way to the obstacle. As long as I am clear and consistent, I can send Archie away from me 20 or 30 feet, sometimes more depending on the flow of the course. I can even do this with contact obstacles. That takes strong commitment to the obstacle on his part, and a deep understanding of what my signals mean and what he needs to do with respect to that obstacle. 

But he's entered in his first AKC trial at the end of December. And there is no question that he will encounter the double jump, the triple jump, the broad jump, and the teeter at that trial. He has never seen these obstacles in class.

I wasted no time in finding a solution to the teeter problem. During the summer, I ordered an aluminum base and prepared the plank myself. In September, Archie and I worked our way up from a tipping plank on the ground to full-height teeter. He's rather enthusiastic about doing the teeter, sometimes pulling off the line I am working with him to run off and do it on his own. Some dogs like tunnels, mine prefers the contact obstacles.

I only started jumping him at his full jump height (16") at the beginning of November so there was no point in working on the spreads until then. And I don't actually have any real spread jumps. Rather than spend more money, I decided to take a more DIY approach.

The double didn't pose much of a problem. It is a bi-direction obstacle with two bars at the dog's jump height spaced about 8 inches or so apart, and crossed bars below to give some depth perspective. It turned out to be quite easy to set two of my jumps next to each other. Archie figured this jump out very quickly, really in just one session. He has since learned how to turn and wrap the double. Rather than trying to micromanage it, I let him figure out that I will handle it like a jump but that he has to alter his take-off and landing points a little to accommodate it. 

I solved the triple problem using a similar, but far more rickety, arrangement. The triple can only be performed in one direction. There are three bars at ascending heights. The back of the jump is the highest bar. I taught Archie a new command with this one: hup. The command "over" works for jumps and for the double, but the triple requires that the dog choose a different point to take off and that he remains extended over the jump to safely clear it. This will also change his landing point. He figured this jump out very quickly too but didn't feel comfortable extending over it, instead using the fox terrier "boing"--most inefficient. Setting jumps before and after the triple and requiring him to approach the thing at speed seems to have solved the problem. Perhaps he senses how unstable this mess of PVC is because he never touches any part of it! 

The broad jump had me stumped for a while. It is a weird obstacle made out of long, narrow wooden steps. The width of the steps can be 6 or 8 inches, and you place several of them next to each other to make an obstacle whose width measures twice the dog's jump height, which in Archie's case would be 32 inches. The tops of the steps are usually sloped with the front a little bit lower. The obstacle as a whole doesn't ascend in height though. 

I finally hit on a quick, cheap solution. I bought a wooden shipping pallet for $4 and sawed off a couple of slats to make it close to the right jumping width (it was okay in the other dimension). I slapped a coat of white primer on the top and sides, then added "racing stripes" (as recommended by AKC to improve depth perspective). I used paint I already had from preparing my teeter plank. 

Then I set up jump standards on the four corners, and voila! A very ugly but workable facsimile of a broad jump. I use "hup" on this obstacle too. Archie needed the prompt of a jump bar in the middle of it for the first few times over it, but he figured this one out quickly too. At first, he sailed over it with his hind feet tucked way too far forward but adding jumps to the approach and exit to increase his speed helped him sort this out. 

Archie will never see equipment quite this crappy in competition, that's for sure. That wobbly triple I cobble together never looks the same two training sessions in a row. But I think that's okay. As part of learning the obstacle, he is learning that although there may be variations in its configuration, his performance of it will not change. He's proving to be a smart little dog who thinks on his feet. 

Diary of a Second-Year Vet Student: Dx the Dz

No vax. Tx with abx only reduces Cx.

Somewhat cryptic but you can probably figure it out: no vaccine available. Treatment with antibiotics only reduces clinical signs. 

You already know that Rx means prescription (derived from the Latin, of course). We "health care professionals" use lots of abbreviations. Ddx is differential diagnoses, a ranked list of the things that could be causing the animal's observed symptoms. Related to that is dx which is used to mean diagnostic or diagnosis. Sx is surgery. I think that X is used because it is not otherwise a super common letter in the common languages of health care and medical science (which are mainly Latin, Greek, English, and German; French and Spanish are distant players). Disease is an exception to the X abbreviation family. We simply write dz. Diarrhea and vomiting are common enough that they too are abbreviated: D and V (some people draw an arrow instead of a line but computers have been gradually shifting that).

Those are all examples of abbreviations of common usage. They are not appropriate for formal papers or presentations but many vets and doctors will use them in writing up patient notes, for example, or communicating with techs or other doctors. There are plenty of other abbreviations that we use which are actual acronyms: IV for intravenous and Ab for antibody, for example. 

The most bewildering abbreviations are those used for diseases: FMD, CPV, BRSV (foot and mouth disease, canine parvovirus, bovine respiratory syncytial virus). They get out of hand very quickly. I try to avoid them because I think they lead to an uncomfortable level of ambiguity. We already use so many abbreviations and jargon. CAE is a bad disease, but when I spell it out as caprine arthritis (and) encephalitis, I have more things to associate with it: goats joints brain. Not a nice disease at all.

Like med students, vet students must learn about various ways that each type of tissue will respond to injury or disease. But on top of all this, vet students have to constantly overlay species variations. Some canine viruses can infect other species--the resulting disease may be like the one in dogs but it may located in entirely different tissues and thus have a completely different set of clinical signs, progression, diagnostic tests, and treatment.

In gross anatomy, there were lots of mnemonics we could use, such as the one created by one of my classmates to remember the names of the 12 cranial nerves: O! O! O! To Touch And Feel Very Good Velvet After Hours. Using dz and abx are only a convenience. Most of the rest has to be learned with old-fashioned, blunt force repetition. There are no true shortcuts at this point. 

Archie: Start-Line Stays and Contacts

I convinced one of the other folks in class to film me and Archie on Monday night. Here are some highlights!

It's been raining a lot up here in the Pacific NW so I've had to get creative with training in the house. I decided to tackle the start-line stay problem. Archie loses himself completely when I remove his collar and leash and toss them away. He uses this as an excuse to run off to check out other obstacles, people, bugs, etc. I tried to shape this behavior at home with the clicker. When I removed the collar and leash and tossed them somewhere else (in front, behind, next to), Archie was only clicked and rewarded if he remained sitting and looked at me (looking at the leash first is okay). Turns out, that didn't translate too well into the class setting. So I put his leash on for every run in class, made him sit, and if he broke the stay when I tossed the leash, I put his leash back on and repeated the start line routine. We discovered that the less I said, the better. Sit, stay, remove the leash, if he's still sitting, release him to the first obstacle. That's pretty tricky, really. The reward for holding the sit is me releasing him. But he is still getting plenty of rewards when he runs off. So he started choosing to let me release him over releasing himself.

In this video, he runs off when I remove his collar and leash, and sneaks in a bonus visit to the "ring crew" before coming back to me. It's a good demonstration of the basic problem.

In this video, I am resetting his start line by putting his collar back on. Not only is there manhandling (doghandling?), I'm using my dying rabbit voice to call him back to me. You can hear my videographer snickering. I'll certainly plan on toning down both in the future, although Archie is not a particularly soft dog and isn't put off by wrestling with me and his collar. Another clicker training project...

Archie gets to run the entire course in this one. 

Diary of a Second-Year Vet Student: Drunk Cleaning

It's a thing, drunk cleaning. 

We've had a rough week, we second-year vet students, with two extremely difficult midterms on top of an unrelenting schedule of lectures and labs. But there is a very good likelihood that most of our houses and apartments will be much cleaner by tomorrow morning, all thanks to drunk cleaning. 

There were quite a few animated discussions this afternoon about exactly what is the best beverage choice for drunk-cleaning sessions, and the various merits of this or that beverage with respect to enhancing drunk-cleaning results (consensus: most of choose beer since spilling wine would only increase our cleaning task list). We also talked about when we usually drunk-clean (Saturdays, because Sundays are excellent study days). 

But we've been knuckling down for quite a while to prepare for these two exams, and cleaning one's house falls pretty far down the list when that happens. So: drunk cleaning on a Thursday night.

I stopped into the big grocery store on my way home from campus. In different parts of the store, I ran into several of my classmates gathering pizza, candy, ice cream, and of course beer. No shame, and no judgement.