Where's The Love?

Sorry it's taken so long for me to bring you this update. I thought that the silence from this end would heighten the dramatic tension that all of you were feeling. I thought it would trigger an avalanche of well-wishing cards and letters, encouraging comments to the blog, phone calls. Increased traffic to my YouTube videos, maybe. As it turns out, I thought wrong. No calls, no cards, no comments. No extra hits. Truth be told, I was feeling pretty down about it. "Nobody cares about me." "If only I'd been born a Jack Russell Terrier!" and "Why, oh why, did I have to go and get sick in August when so many people are away on vacation?" were among my many self-pitying thoughts. I was inconsolable.

I think, in some bizarre way, Dad was just trying to cheer me up when he shared his theory that people weren't "showing me the love" because they thought I'd already... how do I put this, well, you know... been tossed my last biscuit. That's crazy! Just because people knew that I'd been diagnosed with a malignant melanoma, given a bleak prognosis and been informed that the proposed treatments were deemed both experimental and expensive and that Mom and Dad were planning a vacation immediately following a scheduled visit to the vet... oh, crap! I was beginning to see his point. I'd heard the whispers at the Dog Park about "the farm". The saying at the park was "The PeeBee's get the meds, the Freebies just get dead." The old timers would explain to the pups that owners of the PeeBees -- the purebreds -- always went the extra mile for their prized investments while the mutts, mongrels and shelter dogs -- the Freebies -- were shipped off to this farm..."upstate". Hey, it may make you may feel better to sugar coat bad news, (the worst news, really), but look, we're dogs, not gullible 4 year old kids. We know the score.

Luckily for me, though, Mom & Dad are suckers for my adorable belligerence and my weepy doe eyes and decided to treat my like a PeeBee and pull out all the stops. Currently I'm in the middle of a course of 4 targeted radiation treatments and I'm scheduled for my second vaccination Friday afternoon.

The route down to the vet's office takes us past a few farms and, I admit, they do look pretty nice. Somehow, though, they look a lot more beautiful to me... on the ride back home.