This boy needs some help.

Photo copyright Aji, 2016; all rights reserved.

Update:  He's gone. 5:00 PM MDT. More later. My heart and spirit are gone with him.

Folks, whatever ya got, my boy needs it.

I hate spring. Absolutely hate it. The winds are enough for me to despise it with every fiber of my being, because they are so incredibly destructive to my own body. But what it does to the animals is so much worse. It's colic and founder season for the horses.

For Griffin, it's CVS season. 

No, that's not the drug chain. It's short for Canine Vestibular Syndrome, a mostly idiopathic (save age, and, in his case, a TBI seven years ago) condition in which the juncture at which a dog's brain and inner ear become grossly inflamed, and it creates a particularly nasty form of vertigo. When you have the kind of rapid-fire changes in barometric pressure we've had the last few days (to say nothing of today, which has been the worst yet), it flattens him. He can't walk; he staggers, drops, falls. He has clonus in his limbs. The vertigo causes such nausea that he can't eat and mostly can't drink water, either, leading to dehydration. I'm reduced to crouching on the floor, ankle be damned, and syringing him with Pedialyte. I've been dealing with this for days, but today has been nonstop. And the longer the weather stays a mess, the longer he won't be able to eat, and it just becomes a vicious cycle, with no fuel in his system to help fight the inflammation.

And the superstitious side of me is damning myself for causing it, because in trying to help someone else's dog, I invoked this goddamn thing as a possibility, and now he's paying for it. Again. This is either the third or fourth spring in a row that he's dealt with this, and it's a bad one this time around.

So I'm begging: prayers, good vibes, whatever magical mystery stuff ya got goin', send some of it his way. He's been my soulmate for more than fifteen years now. We need Griffin, and he needs to be healthy again.

Thanks. 


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