The trips to the dentist were difficult in a whole different way especially the second trip where he was more stressed than I’d ever seen him. After the surgeries there was plenty of healing time where Kody seemed uncomfortable. After the last surgery Kody had diarrhea for three days and I feared I’d have to take him to the vet. That cleared up and just now things are getting back to normal.

Having said that, tonight Kody really wanted to go into our bedroom. I normally keep the door closed to save on heating costs. He went in to show me that he had pooped (firm poop) on the floor this morning after I had gotten out of bed but before I closed the door. I’m guessing it happened when I was in the shower. I just sighed and picked it up. After the diarrhea he stopped pooping, and then he started having big poops. I guess that his schedule is just all messed up because he literally has not done that even once since he’s been potty trained. Oh yeah, there was one time with diarrhea after he ate some horse poop and he went to the same spot to do it.

What’s ironic is that even through the three days of diarrhea Kody managed to let me know when he had to go and didn’t have an accident inside even once. That’s pretty good sometimes even for a human who’s sick! So I know it must have been pretty urgent.

Of all things, firm poop is the easiest to clean up so it’s no big deal.

But it emphasizes the point that it’s been four weeks of emotional and physical pain for both of us. I’m tired.

Having said that, at the moment he’s in a very stinky, very flatulent phase. Yes, it’s a farty party. We are on the couch trying to watch Neil Degrasse Tyson tell us about Pluto with dignity and I’m constantly inundated by foul smelling vapors. Kody is nonplussed by the unsavory scents.

I’d rather have him healthy, buy my goodness, haven’t I suffered enough already?

Then he started chewing on it kind of gingerly, and then he seemed to get into it and was definitely chewing with the new crown with no problems.

Then as proof that things were back to normal he got bored and stopped chewing and tried to get my attention. With bully sticks he always preferred to chew next to me instead of by himself and would wait until I was available to chew them. I assume that same behavior will transfer over to the rawhide as well. I’m finished working and off to hang out with him now and watch some TV, so we’ll see.

He is giving kisses now, so that’s a good sign.

He gets very concerned about the leg where they put the IV in, I think mainly because it’s just something different. I hope that tomorrow he’s feeling his usual frisky self. I have some nice rawhide chews for him to enjoy and I’m sure he’ll love being able to chew again.

Here’s the downside. Dogs are very smart and they can pick up on signals very well. Kody often knows I’m leaving the house before I do and runs to his crate. I think Kody has noticed the signs that he’s going back to the dentist tomorrow and he’s really bummed about it. He won’t give me kisses and he’s just very nervous and wants to stay close to me. I think the final obvious sign was when I removed his food and water dishes (he can’t have food or water 12 hours before.)

I guess it makes me glad that it’s happening so soon. Although he doesn’t realize it, tomorrow will be a piece of cake compared to the root canal, or at least it should be.

I talked about it yesterday, but I’ve come to the latest stage in making it easy to cook for Kody and thought I’d post about it. This is how a make one of Kody’s two meals a day. The other meal is dry kibble fed out of a Canine Genius. Kody is about 15 pounds, for your reference.

The Meat

Buy ground beef or ground chicken or whatever meat you want and shape one pound of it into a square. Then cut three times both ways and you’ll have 16 one ounce portions. Put some parchment paper on a cookie sheet (because it’s wonderfully non-stick) put the ground meat on the parchment and smoosh each piece down a little. Flatter pieces cook faster than chunks. Then freeze these and when they’re frozen take them off the cookie sheet and throw the pieces into a Ziploc bag. Once they’re frozen they won’t stick to each other.

The Rice

Just cook rice in a rice cooker, which is the fastest and easiest way. After you have the rice and water measured properly in the rice cooker bowl, throw in some chopped vegetables like carrots, celery, and/or mushrooms for added flavor and nutrition. Once the rice is done use a small ice cream scoop, which you can buy at a restaurant supply (cheaper) or fancy kitchen store (more expensive). Use the same method of parchment paper on a cookie sheet and then drop the rice scoops on and freeze. Once frozen, put them all in a Ziploc bag and back in the freezer.

If you start cooking for your dog regularly you’ll run out of rice and meat on different days so you’ll only have to do one of these tasks in a single day. Most days, of course, you won’t do either.

The cooking

When you’re ready to cook, get a small pan, add two tablespoons of water, one ounce of the frozen meat and one frozen rice ball. Put a cover on the pan, this is important because it’s the trapped steam the does the cooking. Set the burner heat to 6 (out of 10) and the timer to 5 minutes. When the timer goes off, remove the lid and use a wooden spatula to chop up the meat and rice and stir it around to mix. Then throw it in the dog dish, set aside to cool, and set the timer for 5 more minutes.

Once the timer goes off, stir the food with your fingers and blow if it’s too hot. Be sure it’s plenty cool for your dog, they don’t have the self control to stop eating if it’s too hot and will easily burn their mouth, so err towards the cool side. What’s the perfect temperature? That of a freshly dead animal, of course!

Your dog will love this more than anything else you could give them. This is something even you would actually eat. You would prepare it differently for yourself, probably, but you’d eat the exact same thing. So why do dog food makers make their food so stinky and gross? Unfortunately, probably to hide the poor quality of their ingredients.

Post Root Canal – Pre Crown Food

If you’re a regular reader you know that I cook Kody lunch every day and give him kibble from a Canine Genius every evening which he has fun with. But Kody can’t have kibble again or anything crunchy until he gets his crown, so I need to give him soft food in the evening too.

I went to the store and bought high quality canned food for the evening. As I guessed, Kody didn’t like it and barely ate it, eating just a little at a time then leaving it. I wouldn’t want it either, even though it’s very high quality food, it’s covered in slime and it smells like, well, dog food. So I’ve decided instead to cook for Kody in the evening as well. It doesn’t take me long, so it’s not really a big deal.

The only reason I didn’t do this from the start is that I was concerned about nutrition. Kody just gets beef and rice for lunch, so I was concerned such a simple diet would cover his nutritional needs. Luckily I needed to make a fresh batch of the frozen rice balls I pre-cook for Kody’s lunch and decided to mix in some vegetables. To do this, just start to make the rice in the rice cooker as usual add the rice and the water up to the correct level. Now that you have the right amount of water for the rice, add some chopped vegetables. I added carrots, celery, and mushrooms this time for Kody. Be sure to avoid onions and garlic as those are highly poisonous to dogs.

When the rice is done, there are cooked chopped vegetables mixed in. I scoop out the rice balls with vegetables, freeze them, and that will add a few vitamins and minerals to the beef and rice with very little extra work.

Tip: You can add a lot of chopped vegetables, more than you would think. They get smaller as they cook, so what looks like a lot of vegetables when you put them in will cook down to a reasonable amount. The rice also grows doubling the effect.

Also I finally found out how to cook brown rice properly in a standard rice cooker. You just put two “cups” (rice cooker cups) of rice in and instead of filling water to the two mark, you fill it to the three mark. Brown rice comes out perfect. Tonight I made some brown rice for me just to try it out, but in the future Kody will get brown rice too. Brown rice tastes better than regular rice and it has a significantly more nutritional value and it’s one of those magic foods that fights off everything from diabetes to cancer.

Finally, I also bought chopped chicken breast in Kody’s dinner since his dinner is usually chicken kibble. This may surprise you, even buying free range organic ground chicken breast (and organic vegetables), this dinner ends up being cheaper than the canned food.

Kody loved it and had the excited reaction I would expect him to have when presented with good food. Whatever people may tell you, dogs, like humans, prefer real honest to goodness food.

I’m not really cut out for parenthood. I’m a good parent to Kody, that’s not the problem, it’s just that I’m so sensitive and it really kills me to see him hurting and not be able to do anything about it. I’m just hoping he heals up soon.

For every medical event we’ve had, I’ve done the right thing for Kody. But it’s so stressful for me. Today I had to ask myself, do I care too much? I don’t think I do, but at the same time I need to figure out a way to care without making it painful for myself. I have a simple but high standard: treat Kody with respect and care for him the way I would care for myself, nothing more, nothing less. Kody is a being, not an object.

But the truth is, no doctor is ever going to be good enough, smart enough, or gentle enough for me. The process is always going to be scary for Kody at the time he needs comfort the most. I hate this, but it’s a fact.

I have a friend, David, and we have a similar logical way of looking at the world. When we need to buy something we just want all the facts we can get. God help the poor car salesman who has David as a customer. He will ask every question, all of which will be reasonable, but none of which the salesman will be able to answer. “Does this bluetooth transfer music from my phone to the car stereo and from which phones? You don’t know? That’s reasonable, but do you have the specs? No? Well, how am I supposed to make a decision?” That would only be one of David’s 100 questions for the salesman. He doesn’t necessarily expect them to know everything, but he does expect them to know where to look and to be able to get to the answer eventually. But the salesman knows that he doesn’t really have to answer all the questions to sell the car, especially if he knows David wants it.

I don’t care so much about cars, but I want a reasonable yet comprehensive understanding of the medical procedures that my dog will undergo. I want to know how he will be processed before, during, and after the procedure. How do you keep his mouth open? What drugs do you give him? What if he barks in his holding cage, how will you handle that? What’s your overall theory with regard to handling the fear of your dog patients? (They probably don’t have one, but I would if I were a veterinarian.) I know better than to ask these questions, especially when there are only two dog dentists in my area and I don’t want to tick them off. But that leaves me feeling very vulnerable. I don’t know what they’re doing to Kody or how they treat their patients. In many ways I don’t want to know because I don’t have a choice but to use them. At the same time when Kody comes home and is not feeling well and his cheeks are swollen, I have to wonder, is this normal or the result of an accident or negligence?

It’s not that I think Kody’s doctor has made mistakes, it’s just that Kody’s in pain, and I don’t know if he has or not. That’s the issue that keeps me up at night, at least until Kody is feeling better. But what I have to accept, for my own sake, is that although it is reasonable to question Kody’s treatment, I’m never going to get an answer. Ugh… that’s the fun process of coming to terms with things that aren’t in our control.

Having said that, if you have a dog that has had root canal surgery, please post a comment with your dog’s results and details about his recovery. This will give anyone dealing with this a place to see what they might be able to expect.

Kody could best be described as traumatized followed by drowsy. He can walk and jumped into the back of the car but I think both the post stress and the medicine are making him very tired.

Physically, he has a little patch on his leg shaved for the IV. He coughed every once in a while after I first picked him up. Both of his cheeks are still a little swollen but the doctor says that will fix itself pretty quickly. Kody doesn’t need any medicine after the surgery, and should be mostly pain free without it.

I asked the dentist, “What’s the hardest thing Kody can chew on going forward?” He said rubber toys like a kong would be the hardest thing I would want to give him.

We also had a discussion about rawhide. They sell CET Enzymatic Oral Hygiene Chews for Dogs at my vet and the dentist had them too. The medium ones I would use are about 2″ x 3″ rawhide. I asked the dentist if it would be OK if Kody swallowed these.

His feeling was that it was fine. He has seen dogs come into his office after swallowing the knotted end of a rawhide bone and seen it under x-ray expanded a bit and the dog still passed it without surgery. It’s not a good idea to let that happen, of course, but the point was that a 2″ x 3″ single sheet rawhide chew doesn’t present a very likely worst case scenario. He gives his own dogs chews like this and allows them to swallow them.

This is a big relief to me because even though these won’t last as long for Kody as bully sticks, they will definitely be better at cleaning his teeth.

Speaking of which, when Kody gets his crown placed I will also have his teeth cleaned. It was only a hundred bucks more which feels like a drop in the bucket at this point. Then I will start brushing his teeth daily.

I asked the dentist what a good process was for training your dog to let you brush his teeth. He said, first to put a little wet food on the toothbrush and just let the dog eat it and chew on the brush for a little while. Then stop the session and give the dog a special treat he will only get after getting his teeth brushed. Continue to do that for a few days or until they seem comfortable and then add in kind of touching the tooth brush to a single tooth the way you would want to hold it for brushing. And then stop the session and give the special treat. Over time you’ll be able to truly brush your dog’s teeth.

You never stop giving the special treat after brushing but eventually the dog will basically come and sit with you to have their teeth brushed and then be happy to get the treat. Classic positive training.

I’m just glad Kody is okay. He’s laying beside me in a deep sleep and it feels good to know he’s taken care of. My energy has also come back having put this behind us, or at least the hardest most painful part. I feel like I’m breathing easy for the first time in two weeks. At this point, if feels very worth it to have spent the money on this.