29 January 2003

Signing Off I am retiring my Radio weblog. You are invited to visit my new MovableType weblog. 6:54:44 AM

05 April 2002

Haven't written about Lily for quite some time. She is on the food supplement Dr Ryan recommended, and I am pleased to say she is going very well. On a normal day her back is straight and you can't really tell that there is anything wrong with her rear legs. Lily is undergoing the long adolescent period, during which she likes to challenge our authority. This period won't pass until she matures at about two years old. We are working on giving her good training, but over the last few weeks she has gone thru a few bog rolls, a couple of my old man's books, and some other small items around the house. She even swallowed some unknown items, which made her threw up and had a pretty bad diarrhoea. Touch wood she has not yet done anything to the furnitures. Lily's first birthday is approaching. Time to contact the owners of her parents and siblings and see if we'll be organizing anything. Took Lily to the vet last nite. She has a few "hot spots" on her lower back. It was quite bad. Dr Gerry shaved the hair around that area off and gave us some medicine to put on Lily. He also gave Lily an injection of antibiotics, which should improve the situation within 24 hours. Dr Gerry also introduced us to the Frontline flea control stuff. No more swimming in Castle Peak Bay for Lily I suppose. Need to get an electric shaver and give Lily a good shave next week. 12:48:31 PM

07 March 2002

Here come the boogie men! This morning when I was waiting for the bus to get to work, saw a bunch of dog catchers trying to capture silly-panther and darkie, the resident K9s of the Pine Villas, while they were doing their daily morning routine on the public lawn outside. Me and a lady passer-by went up to explain to the dog catchers that those dogs were owned by a resident of the Pine Villas, and looked after by the caretaker, who's just went shopping and will be back in no time. The dog catchers let silly-panther and darkie go, who went back inside at lightspeed. Silly-panther would be microchipped, but I don't think darkie is. Good thing that we saved them in time, otherwise I think darkie may be put down. 10:29:23 PM

14 January 2002

Lily has just been to her third shot of cartilage protective agent today. I made sure that we left home an hour earlier than last week, and this round Lily managed to control and didn't relief herself until we got back home. Came across some horrible thing today at the vet. A couple bought this very disturbed cat in a plastic pet housing in. Apparently the woman took the cat for a wash up (!) at one of the local pet stores. She haggled with the store assistant, and the store assistant agreed to do the job for HK$130. When the woman went back to pick up the cat, they found that the cat had a red nose, and the finger nails/claws were cut so deep that they were bleeding, not to mention what a terrible state of emotion the cat was in. The woman took the cat home, but couldn't calm the cat down, so she forced her into the pet housing and took her in to the vet. SPCA was notified. I was curious, and asked the woman why and was there a need to send the cat to a wash? The woman told me that this cat smells a bit. I was more puzzled! Cats generally don't smell, as they are very clean. They spend a lot of their time glooming and cleaning themselves. I suspected that this cat has not been neutered, therefore it was giving out a scent. (I don't know enough about cats, and would welcome it if someone would drop me a line confirming this.) If such is the case, then I think the woman was being silly, because unaltered cats don't make very good house pets. And why would anyone do such a horrible thing to a poor animal? I don't know whether it was gross negligence or ill-will, and I hope that whoever did it, together with the owner of the pet shop, would not get away with this. 4:55:53 PM

08 January 2002

Lily has just had her second shot of cartilage protective agent yesterday. She is very nervous when going to the vet these days. I think she has still not forgotten the day when we left her in the clinic for X-ray. She was so nervous, that in the car on our way back, she couldn't control herself and p'd in the car. Silly dog. Spoken to the vet about having Lily neutered (which is very good for Lily's health in her case, and she's not going to be breeding). Apparently she may go into her first heat anytime now. If the operation is done before her first heat, then the chance of her getting breast cancel is dramatically decrease. I have seen a 2 year old bitch that has breast cancer, and it's not pretty. Expensive and hard to cure, and the dog may not survive. Problem with Lily is, the injections she's getting affect blood clog, so the vet recommended that Lily should do the operation two weeks after her last set of injection. So Lily won't be going on to the operation table for another four weeks. Fingers crossed she won't go into heat during this time. She was happy playing with next door neighbours' rabbits yesterday morning. I wasn't there but my mum was watching (in case Lily had the idea that those rabbits may be good to eat...) The maid let those rabbits out of the cage, and Lily was overjoyed with these new little friends. After a while, Lily got over-excited, and the rabbits got a bit scared and hopped away quickly so the maid put them back into the cage. Mike has this theory that the beastiality/natural instinct in Lily woke up, the rabbits sensed it and ran for their lives. 8:37:17 AM

31 December 2001

Just checked my webserver log. Great success w/ Gweilo Leon's flicks! Please feel free to email me and let me know how you like it. Email address can be found at the bottom of this page. Went to see the specialist vet Dr Ryan in the morning w/ Lily. Turned out that triple pelvic osteotomy is not recommended. Lily's left hip joint is the worse of the two, but it has deteriorated into a state that TPO is not suitable. We could do the TPO on the right hip joint, but the left hip joint would remain a problem. TPO is best done on the worse hip joint, and at the same time preserving the better one. This is obviously not possible in Lily's case. The bottom line is that TPO is not going to help Lily very much. We also discussed other options for Lily (sans putting her down.) The important point is that Lily is a house pet, and we would be reasonably happy as long as she is mobile and not in pain. The logical thing to do then is to put her on medical treatment, keep her relatively lean, and wait and see. If her arthritis ever becomes so bad, we could always give her a femoral head and neck excision (FHE, which means to cut off the "ball" of her hip joint, a relatively inexpensive operation at ~HK$3K) which should relief her pain, which is caused by the bones at the hip joint rubbing against each other. Her legs would still be held together by cartilages (soft bones) and muscles. Lily would have to go on a diet for adult dogs (i.e. less nutritious) in order to stay thin and lean. She would be on cartilage protective agents for the rest of her life. The right kind of exercise will also be important. The moral is that, there is always hope. 5:54:37 PM

27 December 2001

Haven't been web-surfing as much over the X'mas holidays, so can't bring you any new links. I have been reading instead. Went thru Book 1 and Book 2 of Harry Potter, and is currently about a third into Book 3. Haven't watched the movie thou, 'cos they are only showing the Cantonese-dubbed version in all three cinemas in Tuen Mun, and I'd really like to see the one w/ the original sound track. Meant to pop out to Yau Ma Tei to see it at the Broadway, but was too tired to bother. Oh well, later maybe. Just arranged for an appointment for Lily to see Dr Ryan, supposingly the specialist in H.K. We are hoping to proceed with the operation to fix Lily's hip problem. I did some research right before X'mas. Lily has got what is called hip dysplaysia. It's a genetic problem that is causes by imperfect hip joint development. I have also found this list, which althou is a bit old, I suspect the situation nowadays isn't much better. In Hong Kong where the majority of the local golden retriever (or as a matter of fact, all dogs) population are rather small, there are a lot of breeding between closely related dogs, so the situation could only be far worse. For those who can't be bothered to visit these links, the summary is that close to 1 in 4 to 1 in 5 golden retrievers suffer some degree of hip dysplaysia. On Lily's family gathering party, 5 of Lily brothers were there. 4 of them already showed some signs of hip dysplaysia. Co Co the mother also showed some slight signs. Not good indeed. Lily won't be getting a hip replacement, which is a HK$20K per joint job. A hip replacement is an operation where plastic implant is put into the hip socket, and the top part of the dog's upper leg bone is replaced with a plastic ball. It is not w/o problems, and usually done on older dogs. The general vet (Dr Pahl I think. The nurses called him Dr Gerry, which is his first name) who did the X-ray for Lily explained the kind of operation he recommends, and I think it's triple pelvic osteotomy. Basically, the socket bone is cut off, rotated by an angle so that the socket sits on top of the ball of the upper leg bone and then put back on. Wicked. Only puppies under the age of 1 are suitable for such operations. Dr Pahl said that Lily appeared to be suitable for this operation. Will keep you updated on Lily. 10:36:35 PM

17 December 2001

On Sunday Lily our five months old golden retriever had a little family gathering at our house. What should have been a very happy event was shadowed by the unfortnate fact that she was diagnosed to have a very bad hip on Saturday, and her only chance is an expensive (~HK$12,000) hip operation. Also explains why she hasn't quite been herself for the last couple of weeks, as she hasn't been eating as much as before. The vet told us that given Lily's situation, she would be in pain. She was tiny right next to her brothers (male dogs are usually bigger than female dogs though). Long story, which I am going to report in detail later. We still haven't decided what we are going to do with Lily. If I finish the web project quickly and the client pay up quickly, then we should have the money for the operation. Of course that would also mean that I would have to wait a bit longer before I could buy that Apple TiBook. 11:22:15 PM