Dear friends,

Oooohhh, I really have my tail in a twist right now!  Just what the heck is the MATTER with so many of you, that your people are bringing you in all sick and weak and dehydrated and sniffly and vomiting and with diarrhea and some of you all itchy too, this time of year?  Have you learned NOTHING from my past words of wisdom??

Gosh!  (I had something else to say, but Mom said it was not a polite word and I have to say gosh instead).  All I can say is if a word makes it through the spell-checker on my computer than it should be good enough for you because it is not easy to type with these fat little paws and do you think I do this work for my own health anyway????? When I could be outside chasing chipmunks instead??? Do you???? Are you listening to me???  Where was I?  Oh.  Yes.  You are listening, I see.  Well.  Good, then.  A lot of you are coming in sick and I think maybe some of you have not been paying good attention to some of what I have had to say in the past about being careful to eat good food and to not get too many shots and to make sure that your people take you for regular walks and that they make sure that you don’t have nasty bad teeth and smelly puffy red gums.  And that you get baths and your ears checked and your feet and skin, too, because remember that lots of places are putting fertilizer out on the grass now and that can make your feet sore if you walk on it, not to mention it is bad for you if you lick your feet after a walk and you swallow that stuff.  Because the companies that do this say that people should stay off the grass after chemicals are applied so I think that it is not very safe for YOU to be on it, either.

In fact, I think I had better tell you a little more about what your people need to be doing for you at this time of year.  And I hope you pay attention this time!  I am not going to talk about food again because you can read it in my past columns.  Instead, I am going to teach you about something that my Mom calls a “Five-Minute Check-Over.”  And I want you to teach it to your owners, and I want you to tell them that if they love you they will do it every single week, every week of the year!  Now, this will be hard, because most owners are very hard to train.  Bless my furry butt, but do they ever send themselves to Owner Training?  No!  It is always Dog Training this and Dog Agility that, and never do they see the sense in training themselves first.  Not to mention, with the butts I see on some of your owners, they’d be better off if they were doing the agility work and not you!  But I digress.  Back to the Five-Minute Check Over.  I want you to train your people to check you over from your head to your butt, every week, for just five minutes.  (They can start with the end they like the best.)

Now – here’s what you need to tell your people to do. Say they start with your nose.  They will take just a quick minute to check your nose, your eyes, your ears, and your mouth and teeth and the hair and skin on your head and neck.  They need to get up close and personal and really look and smell and feel you all over.  Are there any lumps or bumps or stuff oozing out of anything or anything smelling bad or looking red or sore?  If YES, they need to stop and go to the phone right now, to call the hospital to have one of our Doctors check you out.  If NO, they can keep on going.  Now they need to check your front feet and legs, and then your chest, and your belly, and your hind legs and feet.  And then your back, and your tail, and your butt, and your personals (those would be those parts that you like to lick a lot).  They need to keep looking for any of the problem signs I have already mentioned and if they find any, they need to call the hospital right away so our Doctors can make you all better.  Maybe your ears are just dirty, or your nails are long, or your anal glands are a little full and smelly.  Well, then, that’s an easy fix.  Tell them not to be shy and to fix those things for you!  If they don’t want to do those things themselves, tell them to call the hospital to schedule a Nurse appointment to get you all cleaned up.  Or, if they don’t know how, they can ask the Nurse to do a Show-and-Tell and then they can do it for you after the Nurse shows them how.  The important thing is to DO it and not just TALK about doing it!  And it only takes five minutes once a week and you will stay a lot healthier.

Now, why is all this stuff happening to you at this time of year?  My Mom says that a lot of dogs and cats, and bunnies, and pet rats, and really every kind of animal and some people too, all can get more sick when the weather changes.  I asked why and she said because it is a stress to our immune systems with the weather changing and the day length changing and the wind blowing too.  I heard her talking about this to a veterinary friend in Dallas just this morning, and she laughed when she heard how her friend said she explained it to her clients in Texas.  Mom said her friend had a really cool explanation for why we get sick and that I could share it with you.  So here is how Dr. Trisha Ballard explains why we get sick (I have changed this a little because this Doctah tawks with one a’them drawhhhles and cahnsekweyuntly she ca-yun be justa ‘lil haaud tuh unnahstaan).  So I have made it Chicago English, which I know you can all understand.

So, here goes:  Pretend you are on the Starship Enterprise and you are getting ready to take off into deep space.  You think you are all ready to go, and you take off, and everything seems fine until you realize that the Captain forgot to tell Scotty to raise the shields at lift-off.  OH NO!!  There are Klingon ships circling, and pretty soon they are boarding you because you have no protective shields in place!  The fighting is getting pretty thick, and the hand-to-hand combat is fierce, and you are not winning.  This is looking bad for you…..and you are starting to not feel very good……until finally, thankfully, reinforcements from deep inside the Enterprise come to your rescue and save you.  But you really got beaten up badly in the fight, and you take a long time to feel good again.  Fortunately that gorgeous red-haired Doctor and her annoying kid Wesley are there to help you – oh, wait – that is a different ship in a different time – OK, you have that crusty older Doctor to help you get better but he’s good, too, so you finally make it and you recover uneventfully.  Until the next adventure.

Now, why did you get in trouble?  Because you didn’t raise the shields.  And what ARE your personal shields in real life?  YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM.  And why would you have a bad immune system?  Maybe you don’t eat good food.  Maybe you are fat.  Maybe you are stressed.  Maybe your people thought they were saving money and they took you to one of those chain vet so-called hospitals that starts with a V or a B and they got talked into a whole bunch of shots that you really didn’t need and aren’t even recommended by the American Veterinary Medical Association, and now your immune system is all goofed up because it was asked to do too many things at one time and it can’t do any of them well, anymore.  Maybe you were always in pretty good shape but now you are older, and we all know that our immune system changes when we get old.  Maybe the environment is a problem for you.  Some of us are just extra-sensitive to wind and cold and rain and pollens and mold and bad things in our food and in the air.

But there is a lot that you can do to fix those things, and fortunately you have good friends like my Mom and her veterinary friends like Dr. Trisha Ballard.  But MOST especially it is good that you have friends like me, because when you think about it they just talk but I am the one doing all the work here to get this information to you, and I hope you appreciate it.  So next month I will tell you some of the specific things you can and should be doing to keep yourself healthy and I hope you will listen, because our weather is going to continue to be very changeable and weird and I don’t want to see so many of you coming into my hospital sick, OK? 

Oohhh!  And one more thing!  You know those age charts you see that show our age in people years?  They are ALL WRONG, and I read about this in one of Mom’s seminar papers, and I will tell you why next month, too.

Your friend,

LIZZIE