11 August 2006

Now what???

This morning was Nala's appointment with the vet.

I got up early and headed out to the pool so I could get my swim in before I had to take her in. It was a good, though abbreviated swim. I was working on muscle endurance today so there was lots of short distances with little rest in between; like 6 x 50 with :15 RI. I was fun and hard and I'm glad I'm pushing myself like that. Now that I've kind of got the stroke thing down I need to work on speed and endurance. I don't have my workout with me but it went something like this:
400 warmup: 100 swim, 100 kick, 100 drills, 100 swim 21:00 ( why did that take so long??? Am I that slow kicking??)
4 x 100 :15 RI: 2:16, 2:22, 2:21, 2:24
300 pull: 7:05
And due to time constraints that ended it. Those 100's are pathetic. I was much faster earlier in the year. I guess I need to get real serious again and swim 3 x a week, every single week.

Okay, so Nala went to the vet for x-rays. Turns out she has severe arthritis in her hips. She has some arthritis in her knees but not too bad. It's possible she has a partially ruptured ACL on the left side but the doc could not get consistent results so he's not sold on that. Also, if she does it's not her major problem. This whole thing was double edged sword but now I feel like we ended up on the wrong edge. If she had a ruptured ACL it would have cost a ton of money but they could have done surgery and fixed it. Since it's arthritis there's not much to do except manage her pain for the rest of her life. That means she probably be on Rimydal forever. She also take glucosamine/chondroin every day. He also wants to put her on Adequan. This is an injection that's given at first 2 x a week for a month, then every 4 to 6 weeks depending on how she does. Apparently this is the building blocks of cartlidge (I have all the scientific names and procdures and as a science geek find it fascinating, but I'll spare you:) and also acts as an antiinflammatory. So it reduces damages and helps repair it - cool. Luckily, rather than take her in 2x a week, they will show me how to give her the injections myself.

I'm sad because she's going to be like this the rest of her life and it may in fact shorten her life. She's only 8 years old. I figure we have a good 4-7 more years with her. I'm also sad because she loves to go out and it's hard to take her out when she's in pain. I can't walk her. After 1/2 mile she just stops walking, that's it, she's done. Ugh!! My baby!!!! Things will be okay. This Adequan will help her and things will be fine. God, I can be so gloomy sometimes!!!!

Okay, that's it. I have work to do cause I need to get out of here so I can retrieve Nala from the vets.

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