I was born on April 5, 2007. I came from a really bad place that claimed to be a rescue. My mom was an Australian Cattle Dog and they claimed my dad was an Australian Shepherd but it's pretty obvious he was a German Shepherd. The place I came from claimed they caught me when my mom was giving birth but my people are pretty sure I was bred there because my mom gave birth to a 2nd litter of puppies at this place a year or so later and one puppy looked just like me and one looked just like my sister. The place ended up getting shut down for pretending to be a 501c3 charity when it wasn't. They have started another "rescue" and are in trouble for animal neglect, fraud, and identity theft.
June 9, I went to an adoption day at a Petco and was adopted by some people. They sent me back to the bad place on June 12 because all I did was cry, whine, and bark because they kept me in a little plastic crate most of the time.
June 16, I went to another adoption day at a Petco. I wasn't feeling good and the 45 minute ride didn't help. I was put into another of those tiny plastic crates. The plastic crate was put on top of a crate that held a huge dog. As soon as we left, my crate slid off the big one and got wedged in the back of the truck at a 45 degree angle so I only had the back of my plastic crate to stand on. I tried to tell them something was wrong by barking and crying but they wouldn't stop. Everyone could hear me coming at Petco because of my barking and crying. When they got there, they opened the back and everyone could see how my crate was sitting. They put me in a wire pen with a bunch of other puppies. The 1st thing I did was have diarrhea that the bad people said was because I had just been dewormed. Then I noticed a man and a woman looking at the puppies. I went up to the woman, stood on my hind legs, held my front paws up to her, and asked to be picked up. The man picked me up, put me in the woman's arms, and she didn't let me go until the adoption paperwork was signed. He disappeared for a while to get money to pay for me so I took a short nap then went shopping for some new puppy stuff. I ran out of Petco at 2:00 p.m. and went to my new home.
As the day went on, my diarrhea started to get worse and worse. My people checked my paperwork and saw that the bad people had lied about deworming causing my diarrhea because because it had been a while since I had any deworming medication. At 2:00 a.m. on June 17, I was rushed out to the car, my woman drove like a maniac, and we went to an emergency vet. They did some horrible things to me and discovered I had coccidia and the worst case of giardia they had ever seen. They also said I should have weighed almost 3 pounds more than I did. It's hard to tell in the pictures but I was pretty much skin and bones and my fur coat was so thin my skin could be seen through it. I also had a bunch of untreated bite wounds on my hips that were made by a much larger dog. The emergency vet and his staff didn't think I'd survive because I was in such bad shape. My people started feeding me tiny amounts of food because that's all I could keep down without bringing it back up. My woman would get up at with me at 4:30 a.m. to snuggle and start feeding me a teaspoon of food every 45 minutes. Over the next 2 weeks, I learned that crates were pretty cool caves (complete with toys, pillows, bedding, and a radio), people's hands don't hurt me, I would never go hungry, I would never be picked on, and I had found my forever home!
2 weeks after I was adopted, I was back at the emergency vet where they kept me overnight to give me IV antibiotics and fluids because they were afraid I was developing pneumonia. The next morning my people picked me up and took me to my regular vet for more IV antibiotics and fluids. I got to come home that afternoon.
Over the next few years, with a lot of hard work by my people and my different vets, I became a healthy, happy, loving, energetic, playful, obstinate, hard-headed, 60+ pound Puppy Butt!
Over the past 7 years, I've been diagnosed with many health problems. Some are from injuries, some are from age, and the others are genetic. Healthy exercise, rehab vet visits, acupuncture, cold laser therapy, Pulsed Electromagnetic Field therapy, massage, TENS, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and warm water swimming has helped me reach 14.5 years old without the need for pain meds or anti-inflammatory meds.
I have 3 auto-immune diseases, Pannus, Episcleritis, and Discoid Lupus Erythematosus. This means I have to get meds, supplements, and Traditional Chinese Medicine every day... and keep my stress down because it's worse with stress.
In 2015 I tore the CCL in my left knee. I didn't need surgery but it has caused arthritis in my left hock and left knee.
In 2016 my people found out I have a congenital heart defect that caused something called Mega-esophagus and I should have died as a very young puppy. My heart never lost something called a "Right Aortic Arch" so it is strangling my esophagus. The place I came from should have had me checked out by a vet because I was doing so bad when they had me but they said I was a runt and runts are always sick. Once my people found out, it was too late to fix it. They had to change how I eat my raw food so what I eat is more likely to make it into my stomach and not come back up and possibly go into my lungs.
In 2019 I was diagnosed with Collapsing Trachea and Corneal Endothelial Degeneration. This means the tube I breathe through is collapsing on itself and can make it hard for me to breathe sometimes and also makes me more likely to get sick from lung stuff. I'm supposed to be too big to get this but my trachea is also sagging inside my body so my vets think the stuff that holds everything in place is getting weak. My megaesophagus also makes it worse. The corneal thing means I have to use 2 kinds of eye drops and see my eye doctor more often.
In 2020 I had aspiration pneumonia caused by my Mega-esophagus. I had to stand in the steamy bathroom, have my chest vibrated, take antibiotics, and get lots of chest x-rays. My people bought a huge grinder so they could grind all my raw food into tiny little pieces so it wouldn't go into my lungs again.
