More on Cinnamon’s Progress

Life is largely back to normal with Cinnamon, except for diet. She still turns her nose up at the Science Diet she’s been eating for the last 13 years. However, if mixed about half and half with Alpo or some other soft and “tasty” dog food, she’ll eat it all. For a while, she would actually manage to spit out the Science Diet pellets while eating the other. Maybe she’s getting hungry enough to eat it all now. Thing is, those “gourmet” dog foods are a heckuva lot more expensive. She still stumbles now and then, but she’s mostly back to racing up and down the stairs, and in and out the back door, although you can tell she’s paranoid by the way she’ll stop and think twice at certain spots. Still veers off a straight line, but now sometimes overcompensates, veering too much to the left. The head is still tilted, but I haven’t noticed her eyes flicking back and forth for a few days. So, status is good and prognosis looks good.

Other than Cinnamon, we don’t have anything to report. That’s pretty pathetic! I’ll have to start making things up.

Oh – and this is true – I quit taking Vioxx a month before they recalled it. I sent faxes to my doctors a month ago asking if they remembered I was taking Vioxx and pointing out the recent studies indicating potential issues for cardiac patients. They weren’t too concerned and left it up to me whether to switch. So, I switched to Celebrex. What’s troubling is that I can’t see any real difference between Vioxx and Celebrex that would make Celebrex safer. But, that’s what the studies seem to indicate. They’ll probably implicate Celebrex in a few more months. Becky’s Blue Cross plan just sent home a notice putting all the Cox2 drugs in a “managed care” category – meaning they won’t be covered by insurance unless approved in advance by Blue Cross, or something like that. It appears to me that the strategy is to discontinue coverage of pain prescriptions; covering drugs that save your life, but not drugs that save your quality of life. Well, that’d save them about $700 a month in my case.