Our Blog - Lucy blog update, May 2023

I haven't updated the Lucy blog lately, so I thought I would put together a set of pictures and videos I have for her. We don't take as many now but I still have a few ... mostly with her agility courses (which she continues to love) and walks in the forest with her puppy-friends. We also had a little medical scare that I will talk about shortly.

But I'll start with her agility ... a a few pictures of her including a new obstacle, the blue and white jump. This is different from the other jumps that are single bars, as it has a bit of length that she has to jump over. The video is one day with her and the slalom. When we first starting doing this, I thought she would never understand it. But as you look at the video ... she totally understands it now!

Another video, this time I tried to get almost the whole course in (you'll see I didn't get one of the jumps in the frame). She was kicking butt this day!

The little medical scare ... Tom had noticed for a week or so that every once in awhile, Lucy would limp the very first time we would toss the ball for her, but we would pick her up and found nothing, and she wouldn't limp after that. Then we took a weekend trip to Bordeaux and I noticed that she was licking one of her paws a lot in the car. When she limped the first time there, we decided to find a vet. It was a holiday weekend but we found a vet clinic open on Saturday afternoon and he was able to see her without an appointment. He showed us a "mass" that was near one of her dew claws and gave us a cream to put on it.

So then when we got home, we got an appointment with our own vet, who took a sample from it and looked at it under the microscope. He was a bit concerned and referred us to another clinic out in the suburbs for Thursday. That vet took another sample from the mass and another from her lymph node and sent those off to a laboratory that specializes in oncology for dogs. As you can imagine, we started to fear the worst right about then. It was bleeding a little and so they wrapped up her paw ... and she was NOT happy about it!

They had shaved the area a bit more and here you can see what it was a little better. So after waiting a week for the results ... everything came back negative ... no tumor, no cancer, no problem. The lab conclusion was that she was bit by something (spider, insect) and she had a semi-strong reaction to it. After another week of cream, the mass has gone away, thankfully.

We have a group of people that we know that all have smaller dogs ... most of us met through our puppy school but others are just friends of people in the group. The group does walks in a couple places North of Toulouse in a couple different forests, and we try to catch up with them every month. I put these in different blog pages, and we did one walk in April and another walk in May.