Look at our broken dog who patiently waits at the bottom of the stairs while I take up groceries so then I can come back down and pick him up!

I think he’s learning that he’s “not allowed” to go up and down stairs, and now waits at the bottom or the top of them expecting to be carried. He’s about 30lbs… couldn’t imagine having to go through this ordeal with a great dane!

Good thing Earl and I have both been powertraining with Ricky for the past couple months

Up the stairs, down the stairs, every time he goes outside for a walk or to come with us on errands… and we even had stairs INSIDE the apartment (there’s a bedroom and bathroom downstairs) so that is one more flight for which to be carrying corgis!

Spotted, on my n3rdlove’s desk tonight:

Apparently the dogs on the cover belong to the author. They all have silly math names, too. (I think the corgi’s name is Regression or something along those lines…).

I searched for more corgi pics inside, but all I found were boring graphs.

Alright, bedtime. I’m completely zonked we ran 9 calls in a 10 hour shift today. All really nice patients, but man going back to back all day wears ya out! G’night.

Just ordered these puppies:

Wahoo!

Been training with Ricky 3x a week these past few weeks- gonna stay with that for the next few months. It’s great feeling so strong!

It’s funny how plain old Chuck Taylors are the standard for powerlifting shoes, although I think it’s pretty cool. Just the basics, nothing fancy! What a refreshing change from Ironmans, with thousands of dollars of carbon junk, $40 water bottle holders, gel holders, water bottle holsters, bike shoes, water shoes, Orca suits, wet suits, etc.

Here you can see Ricky deadlifting 700lbs wearing *his* Chucks:

In other equipment training news, we also just ordered a foam roller for muscle rehab at home (using the one at the gym was grossing me out, especially last week when I saw a woman essentially foam rollering her sweaty groin!). Linus also got some new physical therapy equipment- 5 lengths of various sizes of PVC pipe. We set them up in our living room, and 3x a week he has to walk stepping over them back and forth for 10 minutes. Kinda fun! He’s doing pretty well at it.

Heading up to Tahoe tonight in another crazy storm. Hopefully a less eventful drive than last week!

Our drive to Tahoe last night was quite the trip.

Chronological breakdown:

6:00pm: post school/work, meet at gym, get in a quick workout
7:30pm: Home, showered, load car
8:00pm: pick up Papalote burritos (in retrospect a bad idea, fantastically hard to eat while driving) and hit the road
8:15pm: driving across the Bay Bridge, officially out of the city
10:30pm: even though we don’t really need it, stop to top off the Jeep with gas and also pick up one diet coke to split and a small package of Reeses Pieces. THANK GOODNESS BECAUSE LITTLE DID WE KNOW WHAT WAS COMING….
10:45pm: Linus gets upgraded from traveling in the kennel in back of the Jeep to sitting on Earl’s lap in the front seat
11:00pm: downed power lines north of Placerville have us pulling off the freeway and stopping in a line of cars off the exit. We chill here for about an hour
11:10pm: Search smartphone gps for backroad routes. There are no backroad routes.
11:30pm: Dog gets dinner. Dog gets walked in blizzard like conditions along side of road
12:00pm: Downed power lines cleared, line of cars heads back on the road- driving towards Kyburtz, traffic goes slowly due to massive back logs, avalanches and accidents
1:00am: Avalanche takes out 18 wheeler, traffic stops near Polluck Pines
2:00am: Dead stopped traffic in a line of cars. Everyone turns out their headlights and “sleeps” in their cars
2:30am: Dog is like “I don’t really know what’s going on, but at least I am getting to sit in your lap and get petted all this time.”
3:00am: We move about 300 yards
3:30am: still dead stopped, due to accidents and avalanches. NOTE: at this time we are ONLY 18 MILES FROM OUR SKI HOUSE IN MEYERS!!! ARRRRGGGHH
3:45am: Dog becomes highly valued commodity for his lap warming properties in freezing cold car as we sit parked in the blizzard.
4:00am: woken from dead sleep in car to plow zooming by. Traffic hasn’t moved but man we are cold, starving and worn out. We thank ourselves for buying that diet coke and reeces.
4:30am: Get into fight about whether to wait it out or turn around and go find and check into a fleabag motel. The stubborn one of us is like “I’M NOT TURNING THIS CAR AROUND! We’ll lose our place in line! Greene’s don’t back track!”
5:00am: Rational one wins. Decide to turn around and find a place to pull off the road and snooze. Find a nice side road pull off where we can spy if and when the traffic moves.
7:00am: Cars start moving!!! PRAISE THE LORD.
7:30am: Drive last 18 miles into South Lake. Go straight to Red Hut where we both order pancakes and coffee.
7:40am: Realize that at least four other groups eating at Red Hut were also all stuck in traffic all night on 50! We all bond over the craziness. One poor couple left San Francisco at 3:30pm, only to head up 80, have that be closed, turn around and try 50 and get stuck in the same shitshow we were in…
8:30am: Powder day at Heavenly! Hit up and early chair and make tracks on The Face…. worth the crazy drive? Hmm…
4:00pm: skied all day with a bunch of friends and we are WIPED! Head back to the cabin to sleep for 12 hours straight.
7:30pm: log into email to post this writeup and find this message from our friend:
“FYI, anyone driving up or considering it- all roads to sLT are closed
as of now and things are pretty gnarly out there. Extreme discretion
advised- talking collapsing trees, avalanches onto the road, etc.”

… now he tells us! Haha… turns out he sent that at 7:00pm last night- too bad I didn’t see it then, we could have avoided the whole debacle!

A few photos:
On the ski lift:

All that for… this? The level of snow at the ski house:

Can you spot the corgi?

One more of Linus in the snow- he had fun prancing around! I like letting him play in fresh powder because I feel like it’s nice and supportive of his back, and let’s him sort of “romp” which we don’t usually let him do because it’s too high impact:

means every writable surface in our house gets covered in formulas.

like our PG&E bill:

which, by the way, we just reduced about $70 a month by having PG&E come out and do an “electricity audit” on our house- turns out we were powering the nextdoor (kinda attached) storage unit, which really isn’t part of our rent. So wahoo to that!

Linus doing better still. He’s walking with NO rear leg harness just this week, although still with a somewhat wobbly fashion. It’s nice not having him in that rear harness- not only does it free up a hand for the walker (or, not require two people anymore!) but I think he’s happier, too. I think he’s starting to feel like a “real dog” again. He’s definitely feeling “healed” as he tried to LEAP out of the back of the car two days ago when I took him to physical therapy. There was no leaping for the past four months! Dangerous, but a sign he’s feeling better. Have to keep a particularly sharp eye on him to make sure he doesn’t attempt anymore leaps of greatness. Silly dog

Today we had our first outing to the beach since Linus’ underwent the knife for back surgery AND ACL surgery. So first time out at the beach since… August 2010. He was PSYCHED!!! He was so happy to be out there again, and honestly we were very happy to see him happy

Even though he mostly stayed on leash and we walked very slowly doing rehab exercises, I could just tell how excited and overjoyed he was to be out there on the sand, hearing the ocean, and seeing other dogs running around and playing!

All in all, we have been *very* happy with his progress from back surgery, although the rehab has been painful, arduous, slow and expensive. Linus walks well now with his rear-support sling, and walks poorly without it. It’s been cool watching him progress! Even little things- seeing him re-learn how to wag his tail (nub), or when he regained the ability to scratch with his back feet- are huge celebrations around these parts.

We don’t know 100% if he’ll walk without assistance ever again, and he could plateau at any time. Although at this point I think while we hope for continued improvement, whatever point he makes it to we will be happy with.

The rehab process, which effective, is both a huge pain in the ass and astronomically pricey. Honestly one of the reasons I haven’t been updating on here is the huge time-sink that it’s been to get Linus back and up on his feet! Every six hours, every day, we give him about 20 minutes worth of physical therapy sessions. Once a week I also take him to acupuncture treatment, with Holly who is wonderful. Also once a week I drive him up to a session with the Dog Physical Therapist, who is an hour and a half outside the city!! So that takes almost the entire day, with three hours of driving and 1 hour of appointment. Then in the meantime he’s been having regular interval checkups with both his orthopedic surgeon (who treated him for a bladder crystals/UTI- a cool $390 we weren’t expecting) and his neurosurgeon.

The exciting news is we saw his neurosurgeon on Wednesday and Linus has been cleared off of “bed rest” (crate rest) which he’s been on for the past two months. So he can now walk around the house! This is happy news for us, because mentally we don’t feel like we’re “trapping” him in his kennel all the time, and also we get to enjoy his company around the house while we get stuff done. It’s a very small thing, but it really makes me happy to hear the pitter patter of little paws underfoot zooming in to vacuum up crumbs in the kitchen while I cook! So funny how you miss those silly little things.

We are also cleared to start walking him longer and longer distances on our 3x daily rehab walks. We get to add one minute per day. This is GREAT because it means we can bring him to the coffee shop again! One of our biggest weekend or weekday routines was to walk over with Linus to Que Tal and sit outside with him on the benches while we enjoyed our morning. I really missed that with him! We would still go over to Que Tal, of course, but it was sad with no friendly faced corgi eagerly accepting pets, treats and attention from everyone who walked by.

Part of the reason I stopped posting for a bit was that I think I was suffering from caregiver fatigue. For the past two months, prettymuch my entire existence has been devoted to getting Linus back up and walking on his feet. We had to carry him everywhere, even in our apartment, up and down stairs constantly all while being terrified we would break his back again by holding him wrong! For the first month, every SINGLE time we walked him 3x a day it took the two of us- one steering the front leash and one supporting him with the back harness. Kind of served as a crash course in intensive relationship counseling “Go left, no go right, you’re going to fast, wait why are you letting him go over there? hey my head is hitting these branches woah watch out wait speed up you’re lagging” etc…

The other reason is that I have been extremely busy. We’ve been heading up to Tahoe to ski almost every single weekend, and then I also am doing school FULL TIME this semester! Yay I love it, but it’s certainly been an adjustment. I’m taking medical terminology, a basic entry level bio, a basic entry level math (to get me up to speed to test into a higher math so I can take physics, chem and whatnot) and yoga. Yes, yoga is a college course around these parts! It’s awesome- 2x a week and I even get 1 credit for it. Next semester Earl and I might take swing dancing together.

So that’s the update! Lots of dog stuff, lots of skiing, lots of studying. I hope you’ve all been well.

I’ll try and post time photos of the rocker therapy balance board Earl and I made for Linus last weekend- it’s a wobble board that he stands on and you coach him to balance while you rock it back and forth. It strengthens his core (which is a lot of what we’ve been working on). Also, I took some great photos of him in the hydrotherapy tank underwater treadmill which he’s been doing once a week, so I’ll get those up soon too. Miss you all Thanks for reading! Cheers.

This is so great:

Although Vader’s voice could use some work!! Love how the Death Star plays Wham! Would write more, but I am off to a holiday cookie party (no matter what city I live in, I can’t seem to avoid these darn cookie parties… lol).

First ski weekend up north

AND GUESS WHAT We picked up our season passes!!!!! wahhhooooooooo Please note in both of these pass pictures it was nuking outside before I walked in to get my photo taken, so here I am sporting a bit of a “drowned rat” look. Apparently both mountains let you email your photo in beforehand (which we didn’t know about until we went to pick them up), so next year I’ll have to rock a spiffier look.

We skied one day at Kirkwood and one day at Heavenly. They were both good, although pretty windy both days and lots of lift closures. Still nice snow, though. Met up with my friend Amy for some turns:

Linus got walked in the snow (with his support sling in the back). Earl did NOT want to pose for this picture and was all “hurry up and get over here, my back hurts!”

Linus also had some nice crate rest in front of the fire. I still have a bit of a guilt complex about leaving him in the crate 24/7 except for walks. I feel so bad for him! I wish there was some way to explain to him that we’re doing this for his own good and hopefully resting in his crate for 6 weeks will help him heal.

All in all, an awesome, RELAXING and fun weekend which was exactly what we needed. Excited to be spending lots and lots of time at the ski house this season.

The ULTIMATE way to relax!!

Ahh, sick day

Linus had a followup with his neurosurgeon today. We didn’t get the best prognosis at this point. His recovery is going “more slowly than usual” as most dogs walk within three days. It’s been almost a month and he’s still not walking on his own. He walks with assistance (back leg rear sling support) but can’t really stand on his own and certainly can’t walk on his own. He’s too wobbly and doesn’t have sensation in his back feet.

The surgeon gave us two main options: kicking up our efforts to a more aggressive rehab, or ANOTHER MRI/CT scan and another surgery.

I just don’t think more surgery is the answer. Going through it the first time was SO hard- both on our mental state and wallets, and on Linus himself. He’d certainly lose bowel and bladder control again- and we wouldn’t be sure if he’d ever get them back.

Right now, he’s continent and can poop and pee on his own, but he can’t walk.

Hearing the news at the vet’s… I felt exasperated, deflated, and … annoyed. SELFISH. I am so sick of all this dog stuff ruling my life! All I ever do is think about the dog, worry about the dog, care for the dog. I go to work to pay for the dog’s needs. My entire days off are spent carting him around, bringing him to doctor’s offices and acupuncture, worrying I am carrying him wrong and going to injure him further. Every six hours he gets physical therapy. Every spare dollar we have goes towards his rehab and his care. All this and it’s still not working!!! I am so sick of this!!! ARGH!!

I want to concentrate on my classes, my career, my future, my fitness, my LIFE. I miss when my dog that fit into my life… we would walk to cafes, go jogging together, play at parks, go the beach. Now my life revolves around the dog and none of it’s fun.

Whine, whine, whine.

With that out, I have resolved myself to spirited caregiving for the dog. I know he deserves it, and I know I want to do it. A little bout of selfishness, but it’s over.

Linus is booked to see “the best” canine physical therapist in the Bay Area… she’s over an hour away- up north in Rohnert Park, near Santa Rosa. I think he’ll be seeing her 1x a week for physical and hydro therapy… combining that with acupuncture, hopefully that will be the trick.

Please get better, Linus!! I want to see you run around the beach and play again.