Keep a Good Thought for Our Hero, Zydeco

Many long-time supporters will be familiar with Zydeco's story. Rescued from the bottom of a pile of dogs at a Philippines flea-market, he was flown by his new dad back to the US, where he lived happily for several years. One night, a fire broke out and it was his barking that woke and saved the family and Zydeco's dad raced back into the house to save him. Zydeco was surrendered to FBRN and was adopted by a lovely woman who had him for two years before a sudden, debilitating illness made it impossible for her to care for him, so back to FBRN came our hero.

Zydeco has been dealing with some health issues of his own for the past 18 months or so in our care. He has Cushing's disease, and it has recently been well-controlled until he had a bad reaction to one of his medications.  He also recently had a surgery to remove a tiny growth from the eyelid of his remaining eye. What's that joke about a dog named Lucky?  That's pretty much Zydeco at this point. 

However, the little beast has no interest in lying around feeling sorry for himself. His foster mom grades his well-being on the number of times he can fetch a basketball, and last month he was up to 35 a day, a number we could not match even if we wished to.  Here is an update from his foster mom:
"Well, what can one say about the Z-man? He just keeps chugging along.

"It took quite a while for him to recover completely from his eyelid surgery, but he is up to 30-35 basketball retrieves per day, so we're getting there. His personal best was 45 before surgery.

"His Cushing's is not under control. If you remember, he reacted very badly to Vetoryl, and had to be taken down to a very low dose. I gave him flaxseed lignans and melatonin for a long time, but despite some initial improvement, the Cushing's started reasserting itself to the point where he started peeing constantly and developing calcinosis cutis [CC]. We mistook the first couple of CC lesions for hot spots and treated them as such (and they actually healed), but since then he has developed more lesions. He is currently getting a couple of medicated baths per week to prevent the lesions from becoming infected, and I dab on a little DMSO gel daily.

"I have also started slowly increasing the Vetoryl to better control his cortisol production in hopes that this will curb the CC. As always with Zydeco, the key is constant observation and adjustment to make sure he doesn't have an Addison's crisis in response to the Vetoryl, while trying to keep his cortisol below the Cushing's level.

"He, of course, is oblivious to this delicate balancing act, and is just happy that last month's Barkbox theme was pirates, and he has a new snuggle buddy, FBRN's Akira."

Here are some photos of Zydeco parking his teddy bear toy on his foster sister for safekeeping. 

FBRN is very fortunate to have tremendously dedicated foster families who work incessantly to give our fosters their best shot at healthy lives in loving homes.  In the meanwhile, foster families provide excellent care, compassion, love, and toys--not to mention that, if asked, they develop terrific shoulder muscles throwing basketballs for our fosters to fetch.

All this talk of fetching basketballs has made for a very sleepy

Frog Princess