Saturday Update

I was going to blog yesterday (Friday) afternoon, but there wasn't enough time before sunset. Froggy emailed me wanting to know how the kid is doing, and Otter is much better. She went back to school yesterday.

I called the doctor's office on Friday to ask about discontinuing the claritan, since it doesn't seem to be doing anything at all. Which is when I found out that she's on cingular, I was calling it the wrong name. I explained to the nurse that she wasn't any better but that she wasn't any worse, either. We just don't see any improvement at all and since it isn't changing, we were wondering if she still needed to take the medication. The nurse was nice and chatty, she said she'd get back with me after she spoke with the doctor. I don't know what happened in the meantime, but she got back with me all right. And she was snippy! She said that the doctor ok'd discontinuing the medication, and that he wants to see her next week for another exam and pulmonary function test - neither of which are necessary at this point as a) she just had it in December, b) she is scheduled for another in March and c) she's not worse - just not better. I was polite. Then the nurse got even snippier. At which time, I put my horns out and got snippy back with her. It was way too reminiscent of when we had the original diagnoses of asthma when Otter was 2 1/2 and the (different) doctor treated me like I was making it up. At any rate, I don't think it's necessary for her to go back in at this point. But she's off the cingular and we'll keep doing what we have been doing. One thing that did concern me - the nurse said the doctor wants her to start using her daily inhaler twice a day - once in the morning and once at night. Which he told us in December. But he apparently didn't write it down, and the nurse pretty obviously did not believe me when I told her that the doctor had already told me that. It makes me wonder - what else did he not put in her file? Because the nurse didn't seem to think that we had been in there just over a month ago. I guess we'll see what happens in March.

I think I must be getting old. We watched a Cheech & Chong movie today, their first one. And it wasn't even funny. I was actually pretty bored. Bill, however, laughed his head off. So maybe it's just me? They used to be so funny, but now...

Otter gave the dogs some of their rawhide chips. She put a handful in the basket that their toys are in. Magginator found one, dropped it and then got another one out. Then she chewed on it for a while. After that, she decided she needed to hide it. I was sitting on the couch with a blanket, Magginator put the chip on the edge of the blanket and then she tried to dig her way through it. I stopped her, she pushed the chip further up on the blanket and then proceeded to push the edges of the blanket over the chip. Then she apparently decided that it wasn't covered enough, because she reached the part of the blanket that was over my feet and yanked it back over the chip. Then when she was satisfied, she looked at me and wagged her tail before wandering off. I left it covered up, she worked so hard on it. I got up and went to the kitchen to start making pizza and Otter reported that the dog was trying to take the chip to another place, possibly she was going to put it back in their basket - she was trying to carry the entire blanket in her mouth! Talk about silly. While all this was going on, Frasier had already taken the other rawhide chips out of their basket and they are now outside.

Do we have silly dogs, or what?