My Sparky Dog

Taking a break in the blog to share my dog updates!

My older Cavalier King Charles Spaniel / (Chihuahua mix?) dog, Sparky, has many health issues. He is now on 2 heart medicines, is on prescription kidney diet food, has hock-joint wobbly issues, has very few teeth to speak of, and a collapsing esophagus that makes him cough. 

I am just trying to make Sparky’s last days / months / years as comfortable for him as possible. When I got him in December, 2021, I didn’t think he would last more than 2-3 months. It’s now been about 15 months and he began to thrive in about December,  2022 and January, 2023. 

His fur coat was very poor when I first got him, but it’s grown to a beautiful full coat of fur now. He has the lovely feathers that are a feature of Cavalier King Charles Spaniels and just a luxurious coat of fur. Also, he has been loving his cuddle time - wanting to be on my lap for the first time since I’ve had him. He loves to have more and more snuggles these days. It’s wonderful to see him feel happy and safe and appreciated!

In late January, he has started to become tricky to feed and give medicines to, again. I started to give him his medicines in cream cheese instead of pill pockets, and he liked that just fine, plus it was cheaper on my wallet. (He has become an expensive dog - with the prescription medicines, prescription food, and vet visits for heart issues recently.) 

Well, in February, he stopped eating the medicine in the cream cheese. And now he won’t eat his prescription wet food, either. He just wants to have my Cocker Spaniel’s food - Iams. 

I have learned that prescription food for kidney issues has extra things in it like more water, and vegetables and fillers, to help the kidney have an easier time regulating the water in the system. 

So I have been giving him the Iams food, and adding in things like tiny chopped carrots and blueberries cut in half. I have also given him the fat from the dog food and some water too. It is helping him to keep eating instead of refusing it. He was even refusing treats! But he is better again, now. 

I did have to switch from the cream cheese to the pill pockets again, because he started to refuse his medicine in the cream cheese. Now he has stopped eating the medicines in the pill pockets, so I am currently “hiding” them in the wet food. I have to watch him while he eats, and make sure he eats the 2 medicines, and doesn’t spit them out. It’s working for now. 

Someone suggested putting the medicines in a piece of rolled up bread, and put whipped cream on top. If I need to do that, I will for sure do that. 

My next post, I’ll tell you about my black American Cocker Spaniel, Jasper. 

Wichita Optometrist Part 2

The author of the blog sits behind the wheels of optometry used for diagnosing glasses prescriptions 

Having had such a weird experience with my new optometrist (“Mr. How Do You Like Living in Heaven”), I was resolved not to go back next year, and find a new optometrist. 

I was also weirded out that even though he is thought to be a premier guy of vision therapy, he never said I would benefit from it. He didn’t do 90% of the tests that Dr Tod Davis did to me (which were exhausting, honestly, but they found my extensive problems!)

This guy didn’t even show me the standard book test of a raised butterfly when wearing 3D glasses. “Is the butterfly flat on the page, or above it?” I’ve seen that test since I was in Kindergarten, and even Dr. Davis and other doctors have shown me that test throughout the years!

I asked him if he ever went on the I❤️VT site. (I heart vision therapy.) and he’d never heard of it. That was bewildering to me, too. 

I told him about my blog here, and he said he would check it out. I wonder if he will learn a great deal about vision therapy, more than he knew before, thanks to my site here? That would be interesting. 

So, I had resolved that with the whole, “How do you like living in heaven?,” the lack of referral to vision therapy, the lack of testing beyond “which one is better, A or B?” And the not knowing about the I❤️VT site (that I have blogged about before, my story was in a talk given by Dr. Tod Davis on that site for Memorial Day one year, a few years ago, I resolved not to go back to this optometrist.

One thing he did say that also stuck in my head, in a good way this time, I suppose was: “I’m surprised you don’t wear your glasses very often.” I had thought it was important not to wear them often, since glasses are often over-prescribed and make our eyes weaker and weaker. It’s a real issue. So I feel I have protected my eyes from getting worse and worse, by not wearing them very often. My prescription really hasn’t changed that much since high school in the late 1980s. 

I asked him why it was odd to him that I didn’t wear them much. He said, “because you’re not getting the benefit of the prisms in your lenses.” That hadn’t occurred to me.

Before he would give me my prescription, he tested me about the prisms. He asked me to look at a chart with letters on the wall without the prisms, and then put the prism on my glasses and asked me to tell him if anything was different. 

Without the prisms, my eyes circled around the letters, until they could interpret what it was on the wall and what I wanted to focus on. With the prisms, my eyes went directly to the middle of the chart without circling around it.

He then said that the prisms DO help me. And I felt like maybe I was encouraged to wear them more. I made a mental note to process this and see if I wanted to change my behavior around wearing eye glasses. 

About 2 weeks after my appointment, my new eyeglasses arrived. I went in to try them on and get them fitted. They are nice! I opted for the least expensive option they offered me, which was still fairly pricey (another not to Dr. Davis whose practice offers less costly eyeglasses, because they know vision therapy is a priority and already expensive enough.) I was reminded later that I could have just taken my prescription and gone to a cheaper place to buy the eyeglasses, like online. But I haven’t figured out how to order the eyeglasses with my prism prescription, so I don’t actually feel like I have the option to order from something like 1800Contacts.com or zenni.com or WarbyParker.com etc. 

Anyway, I put on the new glasses and they were a better prescription for me than my previous pair! I was flabbergasted! I took them off and tried on my previous pair, and the difference was quite noticeable. 

My new glasses feel better for my eyes, and I am wearing them a lot more!

I can read with them on, as opposed to constantly having to take them off to read. And I am enjoying looking around my world more, now, with the new eye glasses. 

So maybe despite the fact that this optometrist is a bit odd and Christian-centered in a medical world (so weird & off-putting), maybe I will continue to go to him, because he knows how to prescribe eyeglasses that work for my eyes better than my previous prescription (which was nearly 3 years old at that point.)