A wonderful day, a horrible migraine and a very good dog!

9 months 3 weeks 2 days old

Yesterday was my 1st wedding anniversary. It was a beautiful stunning day and my husband and I had an absolutely wonderful day from the beginning of the day to the end. We started out with wicked but gorgeous pancakes at a restaurant in the inner city for brunch, then took the pup to the dogpark, then off to a fancy dinner and finally ended the day with a movie snuggled on the couch (with Knightley bizarrely watching the movie too!). I hope all our anniversaries are as lovely as yesterday was! Of course today I am completely and absolutely exhausted beyond measure, but it was completely worth it.

Anyway, I am still trying to get rid of a migraine I got on Saturday - as well as a autoimmune/autoinflammatory rash I've had on my face for five or six days now (when biopsied they came up with 10 possibilities, most likely was something rare called lupus tumidus.... but who knows really, sigh). Hubby and I had some shopping to do and I have been sticking to the once a week public outing rule with Knightley until he is a little older and ready for more intensive training, so we took Knightley with us as his weekly trip. The migraine reared its ugly head virtually as soon as we got to the shopping mall (maybe the lighting?) as hubby and I split up to do our separate shopping. By the time we met back up I could barely open my eyes and I was using some of Knightley's natural guiding instincts (going around things or people, or stopping when there was an obstruction) because I was in such a bad shape. Thankfully after hubby rejoined us, Knightley followed hubby and I was virtually able to close my eyes and let the pup lead me through the mall.

The migraines that hit suddenly virtually blind me with photosensitivity, and sometimes, like in the case of this one, give me auras too.... which makes my vision even worse. I really hoped that Knightley was going to be a natural alerter, and tell me when I was going to get one of my sudden migraines, but so far, he isn't giving me any signs I can see. I am thinking that it may be worth training Knightley to do some basic guiding techniques so if I do get a very severe migraine while out I can rely on him to help me to safety. I don't know much about guiding though, in comparison to the research I have done about mobility assistance dog training... so I guess I have a lot of research to do. Mainly the biggest concern is that I don't want him to guide all the time - only when I am such a bad way. Ideally he would just know when to do it, but if not, I would just give him a cue. I just don't know if you can turn guiding on and off like that?? Anyway, he was a very very good boy, and I really don't know if I could have got through the mall alone without him. Even when I was with my hubby, it meant Knightley could lead me and not hubby, who went off to bring the car closer. I was proud of my boy, who is nearly 10 months old, wow!

Where Knightley and I walked this morning. It's a fantastic area
to walk your dog... lots of paths, lots of open grass areas, and
the storm water drain which runs with clear water after rain
(which we haven't had for weeks...) that Knightley gets to splash
around in and run up and down the sides of the drain. We
meet heaps of dogs on our walks too. The weather has been just
stunning over the last couple of weeks as we get to the end of
autumn. The bluest skies you could ever imagine, but some
cold nights well below zero already - and it isn't winter yet!

So, I took a lot of breakthrough medication and much more on Sunday to be able to enjoy my anniversary, but without the breakthrough the migraine is still quite fiercely hanging around. No where near as painful as when it first hit, so perhaps my migraine abortive partially worked, but I am pretty immobile for the moment. Although I did manage to take Knightley for a little walk this morning before it just got too painful to move much, and yesterday's running around doing things caught up with me. I think a doctor appointment may be in order. I refuse to go to the hospital, because I am just too complicated for them.... and I then always end up getting admitted which I **HATE**!! Then comes then scans just in case it's my immune system attacking my brain and so on and so on.... arrggh... I more or less swore to myself after spending my 29th birthday in ICU that I would not be admitted to a hospital unless I was almost literally dying. Thankfully I have been less sick since then anyway, so it hasn't been all that hard to stick to.

Oh, and I've found my perfect training treat! Easy to rip up and free! Knightley tends to eat a fairly lean diet - lots of beef heart, some pork which sometimes is fatty, turkey and occasionally chicken which sometimes has skin, sometimes doesn't... and ox tongue which is very lean. Consequently I supplement with fat from the butcher which he gives to me free as unwanted trimmings. Good fat just pulls apart in your hands easily, so instead of just adding it to his meals, I feed his fat as treats now. He loves it, and it is higher value than his regular meals - which I have a hard time topping these days. His 'flat' is going well now, but I don't use it yet as every day usage - I want to make sure it is absolutely great in every single situation I can think of using shaping and basic operant conditioning, and then slowly fade the treats when it is learnt so I end up with a 100% reliable down. Unlike our last one which slowly grew less reliable and slower over time because I lured too much and faded too fast.

Speaking of raw food, Knightley now only eats one meal a day, and that is working a lot better for us than morning and night. While I was planning on keeping him on two meals a day until 1 year old, he just became uninterested in his morning meal, whilst he will happy eat the whole day's worth at night. Today it was an entire turkey leg which he efficiently cracked and chewed and basically completely devoured. Flesh and skin are natures way of flossing an animals teeth! You should see Knightley's beautiful glowing teeth - he often gets comments at the dog park.

Anyway time to sleep and hope this silly head settles down. *waves*

Can people with Lupus (and other autoimmune/auto-inflammatory conditions) get service/assistance dogs?

9 months old

This is the second post in a series answering some of the most common search queries I receive on my blog. The first one was about raw feeding. Also, let me say that I am not sure whether I have Lupus or possibly an auto-inflammatory disease, but the following advice still stands, and can be applied to many other people considering an assistance dog.

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The basic answer to the question is yes, a person with lupus can have an assistance/service dog, however it isn't quite as simple as a yes/no answer. In order to have an assistance dog you must be disabled by your illness. This is an accepted definition of disabled:

An individual with a disability is a person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.

So if you have a lupus diagnosis (or another autoimmune disease) but it is well under control and having a service dog (we call them assistance dogs here in Australia) will not suddenly bring you massive independence, and help you at home too.... then let me suggest that you will not fit the full legal description of disabled. It is very important to be sure that you are disabled. Would you qualify for your countries disability pension/social security benefits? It is important because legal challenges to assistance dog handlers do happen, especially if you stand up for your right to be in a place, and owners of shops do occasionally take handlers to court (especially in the US, but there is a well known case here in Australia too). So you must make sure that you are indeed truly disabled before seriously considering getting yourself a dog to help out. The best advice is to actually assume that one day you will have a legal challenge to your public access and will have to prove to the court that you are disabled. The definition of an assistance/service dog is very much based around the fact that its handler is disabled:

An assistance (or service) dog is a highly trained dog who works with a disabled handler in order to help alleviate that handler's disability.

So if you believe you are disabled by your illness, then legally you are on the right footing, but there is more to consider.

Keeping a dog takes a fair bit of work - it's not like they run themselves like a wheelchair or crutches - and it's significantly more than a normal pet dog. They need the very best of equipment, food and veterinary care.  They also will need training maintenance, even if they are fully taught when they come to you. Do your research and if you think that the benefit of having an assistance dog is going to easily outweigh the care you will need to give, well now we're getting somewhere!

Think of some of the tasks you would want your dog to do for you. Properly trained dogs are smart and able to carry out an amazing array of tasks, but it is important to consider that just because a dog can be trained to do something, it isn't necessarily right to have the dog do it. Some tasks can put too much physical strain on your dog and significantly shorten its working life. If you are getting your dog from a program then they will be doing that final training for you, and shouldn't let you harm your dog. But if you are planning on training in conjunction with a program, or if you are planning on training yourself, you must keep this in mind - just because I can train it, should I? For instance, instead of having the dog pull you up from your chair, train it to go retrieve a cane on cue. A good guideline is to think of three main tasks you would want the dog to do for you - those are the recommendations for any service/assistance dog by Assistance Dogs International. If you can't think of three things to make your life easier, then really, you're not going to make full use of a dog (mind you, this is for people with a chronic disease, for some other conditions like epilepsy, one task might change their life).

A photo of Knightley picking up my sunglasses for me. He is
getting good at picking up mostly anything I want him to -
inside the house that is. If you do want to train your own dog,
don't expect your dog to be able to do this type of assistance
 retrieve at 9 months old like Knightley. He is a little ahead
of schedule at the moment! He doesn't get it in public yet - I am
having to teach it from the beginning all over again there.

I'll give you a quick picture of what Knightley (my dog) is doing for me at 9 months of age. He will pick up objects for me at home on cue, although we haven't worked on tricky ones like credit cards and coins yet. He will pick up the strap of my handbag, and we are working on picking up my crutches. He isn't good at picking things up in public yet, he doesn't have the focus for it yet. He is starting to accompany me to our local shops occasionally for training, and we do a *very small* amount of forward momentum work, especially as we leave and there is a little rise to get out of the shops. Until his joints are fully grown at 18 months of age it isn't safe to let him do much of either that or counter-balance work. However, I can tell from these small experiences that having Knightley with me will definitely give me the option of public transport once again (that was an aim), as well as increasing my stamina and independence when out shopping etc (I haven't really shopped on my own for nearly four years). Another task I want to train in the future is to teach him to lean against me when I am standing for a period of time to give me some support, in either a sit or stand. More tasks will be helping me when I have a migraine by doing basic guiding (like a guide dog) as my migraines can be blinding. I am also training him to do deep pressure, (which is usually a psychiatric service dog technique), and have him lie in certain positions on my lap and chest to warm me, calm me, and relieve pain and cramps. While advanced training doesn't start until 1 year of age at most programs (or even 18 months), as I know Knightley is always going to be mine, and since I already know what I want Knightley to do for me, it means that I can begin to train the simpler tasks that will make a real impact on my life at an earlier age.

So, the answer is yes, people with lupus certainly can get service/assistance dogs. However, it basically depends how sick you are and if you are legally disabled. Further considerations are whether the dog is really going to make a big impact on your life, whether the dog's care is less onerous than the benefit it will give you and whether there are clear tasks you can think of that won't endanger the dog but will alleviate your disability. Speaking for myself, Knightley has already made a huge impact in my life and as he matures and learns more it will be even more massive.

If you think the various points I have mentioned sound like they apply to you, and the rest sound reasonable... then certainly look further into getting yourself an assistance dog. The Yahoo group "assistance-dogs" is a great resource for further information, as is http://www.servicedogcentral.org. Sue Ailsby's Training Levels (see the tab named Training Levels at the top of this page for more information) is a fantastic training system for those who want to train their own assistance dog, and her new books feature a wonderfully easy to teach assistance retrieve. Good luck!

Rain, rain and more rain, lump going down, and not very well

7 months 3 days old

This is a post to say I haven't died! Not sure how long it will be....

Since the show we have had days and days of rain, to the point yesterday the nearby storm water drains were flooding their banks and going over the footbridges. It was an impressive amount of water!

Poor Knightley hasn't really been for any walks since the show, so he has had a lot of time to digest the experience! Every time he comes back inside he needs toweling off, even if I put his rain jacket on him. I hope he doesn't get any hotspots (caused by a fungus from having damp fur) because its almost impossible to get him dry at the moment.

His raw feeding is going excellently. He is loving eating chunks of meat for his meals. I recently got some turkey drumsticks for him - absolutely massive things - and wondered how he was going to handle them. However, it only took a couple of minutes of chomping and grinding (the noise as he breaks up all the bones is amazing!) and the whole thing disappears! He has been on raw for a couple of weeks now, so according to the schedule he can start to branch out to more adventurous meats. I'd like to get some interesting organs for him. I did get some chicken hearts for him last week but they are counted as meat, not organ. I need to find something like spleen, tripe, trachea etc. A raw diet is complete with the ratios of 80% muscle meat 10% bone and 10% organs (of which half must be liver and the other half whatever you like). I am looking forward to finding more interesting foods for him to eat now he is over the first couple of weeks.

His lump is definitely reducing, even though his antibiotics have finished - I guess they have done their job. I won't be happy until it completely disappears however. It seems to have been an infection of some kind though. We were lucky!

I haven't been well since the show. I'd had a sore throat leading up to it, and since then I've been down with a virus of some kind. I've also had a bit of a lupus flare as regards my skin... I get rashes when my immune system is struggling with myself. It's a sign I need to take it easier. I couldn't go into work this week, which I was sad about.

We're working on Sue Ailsby's Training Levels, Level 3 at the moment, even though I'm not very well. I'm working on getting Knightley to watch my eyes for 15 seconds even when I am not maintaining eye contact with him. We can now *just* do 15 seconds, but only in low distraction environments.

We're also doing lots of door zen, so that in the future I'll be able to have the front door open and he will know it's a boundary he can't cross. I already have it down with some other doors.... for instance I don't want him following me into the garage from the house, as the garage might have potentially toxic spiders in corners where Knightley could find them, and now Knightley knows that door is not to be crossed. He also waits to be invited through the front door when we are going out or in, although it isn't quite as solid when we are going out. The problem comes along when someone is outside and he wants to join them. Door zen just disappears. It makes taking deliveries difficult!

The last thing we are doing is recall with higher levels of distraction. He is good now in the house responding to my "come!", but at the dog park for instance, he is .... well... hit and miss! So I am throwing his favourite toys and then calling him back to me in mid run towards them. Stuff like that, just to increase the distraction level a bit. He is doing well.

We have also received our Comfort Trainer halter, so have swapped to that instead of using the Gentle Leader we got temporarily. I'll let you all know in a future post what I think of it.

Anyway, that's all for now. Time to get warm again and stop feeling like death warmed up!

Not the usual place, but worried

So this is not the usual place to worry about this type of thing, but I don't want to load it onto anyone else at the moment, so you're going to have to cop it. Recently, whilst on the very looong flight to the UK to get married I got two DVTs in my calf. This was the second instance of clots in the last year or thereabouts, so it seems I am going to be on warfarin for life (although I am thinking about seeing a specialist about it). It also may be being caused by my autoimmune condition - I should soon find out from some blood tests done about a week ago. However, the calf in which the clots were last time is pretty sore. No way near as sore as last time but sorer than it should be, sorer than my first clot. I don't know what to do. -.- I did tell my husband that it was sore, but really only in passing. I can't decide whether it needs to be checked out with an ultrasound, whether I need to go to the hospital or what. I am on warfarin as I said, and my INR (how thin or sticky my blood is) was tested just a couple of days ago and it's really good. I've also been wearing compression stockings quite a bit recently, although not all daylight hours every day as before, as my GP doesn't think I need to wear them quite as much now it's nearly two months after the last clots and my INR is excellent at the moment. Having said that, the UK clot people thought I should wear them for TWO YEARS (I nearly died in shock when they told me that) so I don't know what to think. Maybe I have caused a clot by not continuing to wear my stockings full time???? If anyone is out there, what should I do? :(

Briefly on the dog topic, no reply from email to latest breeder.... getting impatient! They should be at my beck and call damnit. I am either going to have to start lowing my hip score standards, or go further afield for my breeders, sigh, there could be some long drives to choose and pick up puppies.