I’ve gotten way behind thanks to the holidays and weather, but did want to update everyone on what BeeBee’s been up to. She continues to grow longer and remains very svelte. When I carry her up and down the stairs, sometimes she drapes over my arm like Feron, the cat belonging to the Little Red-Haired Girl (I think) in the “Peanuts” comic strip. In a way, it’s easier to carry her that way than when she’s more upright and liable to swing her head around at any time. Carrying such a dog multiple times a day is also a good
Read more →As I discovered when we had our first major snowstorm, something quite unintended. To be sure, BeeBee loved romping in the snow once I’d cleared an area for her and Frica to play in. I also enjoyed the fact that the snow was deep enough that I didn’t have to worry about them going anywhere but where I’d shoveled because the deep snow acted like a natural fence. But above and beyond that, BeeBee enhanced my snow-shoveling experience for a quite unrelated reason: carrying her up and down the stairs for the past three months has increased my arm
Read more →Since I got BeeBee, I’ve been looking for something that would enable me to readily see her in limited light or darkness. There were two BeeBee-related challenges to this project. The first is that she’s so low to the ground that it couldn’t be anything of any size that dangled from her collar. The second is that she’s now getting a corgi ruff that could hide a smaller light source. As luck would have it, someone sent me an email about some dog-related event. The event didn’t particularly interest me, but I immediately zeroed in on a notice about
Read more →In addition to allowing her to compensate splendidly for her deafness and visual difference, BeeBee also uses her nose like a 5th appendage. Because of her pronounced overbite, she can stick her nose into narrower places than a dog of similar size and conformation with a normal jaw. This enables her, for example, to get her nose into the tiny space between the wood rack and wall. But much to her consternation, that’s all that fits there. I can always tell when her nose locates something tantalizing that she can’t grab or lick up with her lower jaw or
Read more →In the last BeeBee blog I talked about the real possibility that, thanks to her various impairments, BeeBee’s brain works differently. I use the word “impairment” for convenience, fully aware of the fact that whatever she experiences is normal for her. It’s conceivable that she looks at me and the other pets and thinks how lucky she is to possess the wherewithal to live with those suffering from so many limitations. Relative to perceptual ability, I’m sure even the average normal dog and cat thinks that about any humans they live with every day. Just as humans born lacking a particular
Read more →If you have a medical background like I do, you can’t help but wonder what goes on in BeeBee’s brain. To begin with, I’ve given up thinking that there is just one lesion or abnormality that will explain the whole shebang. That’s the left side of my brain talking there. My right brain still clings to the hope that there’s one, reversible condition that would explain it all and that said condition will magically right itself when Mars is in the 7th house of Pluto or some such thing. Realistically, it seems that her symptomatic hodge-podge involves both her
Read more →I swear, every day BeeBee gets longer and sometimes it takes a heroic effort not to worry about what that means for both of us. When she’s standing still, anyone with a basic knowledge of physics would recognize that the span between her front and back legs is too great. Were she an bridge, a engineer would immediately shout, “For heaven’s sake, put a support in the middle before the whole thing collapses!” And, indeed, I’ve had fleeting thoughts of strapping a roller-skate to her mid-section as a preventive measure. Realistically, though, that’s not an option, any more than
Read more →I heard a news report the other day about how climate change is precipitating a burst of mass wildlife extinction. That’s hardly surprisingly and not really even news any more. And those who prefer to remain in denial about any modern human contribution to this can rightfully claim that such mass extinctions have happened before. What sticks in my mind about this particular interview was the scientist’s response to the typical newscaster’s question: “What will the loss of all these species mean to the average person?” The scientist somewhat blithely replied that the average person living in a western
Read more →It’s been rightfully, albeit jokingly, pointed out to me by my best bud in whole world, Ann Firestone, that I did not acknowledge her role in bringing BeeBee into my life. It was Ann who immediately thought of me when she and Mary Taylor saw the pup and Ann who broached the subject of me taking her. In spite of my vow never to get another corgi after Violet the Wonderdog died, Ann intuitively knew BeeBee and I would be a match. How did I forget Ann in the commentary? It’s simple. Ann is like air, such an important part
Read more →BeeBee has taken to barking–a loud, shrill bark–for no apparent reason that I can discern. When hearing dogs do this, I assume they’re reacting to some sound I can’t hear. This raises the question: what is she barking at? Accepting that I have no idea and that the bark is very annoying, including to the other pets, I’ve devised a hand and body language signal that means “quiet.” The instant I used it the first time, though, a funny thing happened. It hit me that BeeBee had created a koan for me. Surely expecting a deaf dog to obey
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