Charlie's prognosis

Not much to report in our world today.  The kids were off to school and Sheri was off to work.  They have to continue with their lives even though we are here.

We took Charlie to the Vet at 8:30 and dropped him off.  The x-ray machine was still down but there is a tech coming so they will just keep him until they can do the x-rays.  They called us to come down to pick him up at 2:30.  Good news is that Charlie has nothing broken in his front or rear leg.  Bad thing is that he has really bad arthritis which is mainly caused from the Prednisone he has been taking for his allergies.
We are aware of the side effects of Prednisone and made a conscious decision to use it because Charlie would have chewed himself to death from the itching he had.  The vet showed us the x-rays and there was a lot of little calcified particles floating around his joints.  He figures one of these have lodged in the joint of his back leg an is causing him pain when he bends it.  He said kind of like having a rock in your shoe.  Really uncomfortable.  It may move on in a while or it may mean surgery to remove it, but with pain meds, he recomends we wait to see what will happens until we get back to Brandon.

Our poor Charlie is falling apart an I can only hope that he gets over this as quickly as possible. We do know that with the meds he is on, his life expectancy is greatly reduced so we only hope he doesn't have too many hurdles to cross before his time is up.  I hate to see animals in pain because they don't understand it and can not tell us about it.  We will keep everyone up to speed on this as we go along.  For now he is happy and being spoiled rotten by the kids and is lapping up the attention.

Tonight we are Street Docking outside our daughters house in Lacombe Alberta, and this is the view looking from her window looking out on the Ponderosa.