thyroid panel

Freya’s thyroid panel results came back today, and everything looks normal. Not low-normal, normal. It looks better than the last one we did not quite two years ago. We also did a regular blood chemistry panel, and everything looks fine there, too.

On the one hand, it’s good to know that everything looks fine with her health right now. She’ll be seven years old in November, so she’s well into Rottweiler middle age. On the other, since I’m her primary trainer and handler, her recent training issues then point straight back at me and my less-than-stellar dog training abilities. Ouch.

Although yesterday’s exercise in gratitudinaety definitely put me in a better place, I’m still not sure where I want to go with my training and trialing plans for Freya. Remember that the big question that remains:

How can I help this dog to live with more joy and be more connected to me?

If Freya is not finding any joy in training and competing in rally obedience with me, does that mean I need to find a way to make it fun for her again, or let her retire and just be a plain old dog? I’ve retired dogs before, but it’s always been for health reasons, not because they just didn’t want to play the game or do the job any more, so I’m not quite sure how to handle this yet.

I so wish she could talk.

Whatever I decide, I am still grateful for this sweet girl who is sleeping upside down on the loveseat right this minute, just like yesterday’s photo.

(NaBloPoMo | July ’10: 14 of 31)

You’ll remember that I was debating with myself about running a thyroid panel on Freya. And you knew I’d end up doing it, didn’t you? As mentioned before, it’s a long shot. But at best, it could provide an answer, and at worst, it rules out something.

We did the blood draw on Saturday. With the holiday weekend, I don’t think I’ll hear any results until at least the end of the week or early next week since thyroid panels are sent out to Michigan State University. Freya’s last test was almost two years ago. I looked at it again on Saturday and while the values were within the normal reference ranges, several of the values were towards the lower end of those ranges. So I am wondering if she has in fact been borderline hypothyroid for a while.

When I was at the vet on Saturday, I was surprised to see how many people still use acepromazine to sedate their pets. I guess it does work fine on some pets. It did nothing for at least two of our previous Rottweilers, and I never considered trying it with these two. Rescue Remedy either helped, or at least gave me something to do for the dogs. Both dogs (and their humans and felines) got through the Fourth of July weekend without too much wear and tear from the fireworks. It seemed as though there were less fireworks in the neighborhood than last year, but from the sound of it, some people had more firepower as well. The dogs thought we were at war, but once they were convinced that there was no immediate need for them to follow (or lead) us into battle, everything was fine.

(NaBloPoMo | July ’10: 5 of 31)