ruby


It’s been about two weeks since Ruby’s trip to the vet. As of today she’s been on her steroid pills for a week, per the vet’s prescription. We grind them up and mix them with peanut butter, which Ruby scarfs down. We give Annie unadulterated peanut butter so she will leave Ruby’s peanut-butter mixture alone.

The pills seem to be helping her, like the steroid shot did. However, she’s having difficulty getting up off the tile floors. I now have to bend down and lift her rear so she can stand. If she’s outdoors she doesn’t have any issues standing up from a prone position, such as in the photo above.


She’s also going to her pads, both the outdoor variety and the indoor variety. As long as she stays on her pads she’s able to get up and move around the inside. She does that quite a bit now to go out into the kitchen and drink a fair amount of water. The vet said she’d get thirstier on the steroids, so I’m not surprised by that.

We still do out daily walks, but they’re slower and a lot shorter than even a month ago. Still, she wants to go out and it would appear she enjoys her perambulations.

We take this day by day. Each extra day is a blessing.

don’t buy these for your dog

As noted in my last post about Ruby, Ruby has had problems gaining purchase on the tile floors in our house. She can’t stand up without human (me) aid. So I decided to try out these “performance” dog shoes, at least on her back paws. I thought that the non-skid soles would help her stand up by not allowing her rear paws to slide across the tiles. How did that turn out, you ask?

Rather horribly. The shoes are clunky and rather stiff. I tried to put a pair on her rear paws only to watch her have even more difficulty with the shoes on her feet than off. In the end I took them off and today I returned them to Amazon by dropping them off at my local Whole Foods.

In the mean time I’m getting pads to put down on the floor for Ruby to lie on, and those pads help her to stand. The pads have the added benefit of being softer to lie on than the hard tiles.