a bit of an explanation...

If you looked at the writing on the journal pages in my last post closely, you may have seen that I wrote a good bit about someone being sick (good eyesight, Mom!). So I thought I'd better explain: Prescott was sick last week, and it was a bit of a rough couple days. (He's better now, thank goodness.)

Last Monday evening, he started favoring one of his hind legs, and that progressed over the next couple days to being so stiff and sore (? we're assuming, anyway) that by Wednesday, he wouldn't really walk at all, which was quite worrying! I carried him down the stairs and to his bed where he rested all day till I could get him to the vet. He just laid there, snuffling with a runny nose, and generally looking pathetic:

here he is, looking pathetic, with a 104.5 fever...
(fyi, a dog's normal temp can go up to 102.5)

I got him to the vet's office where he looked pathetic for Dr. V. and tried to hide behind the exam room chair (not his usual behavior, at all). The vet prescribed an anti-inflammatory steroid and a painkiller to help reduce the pain in his joints, and took some blood for a battery of tests. 

She thought it might be Valley Fever (a fungal infection that's endemic to this area; it lives in the soil and is usually asymptomatic) or tick fever (a bacterial blood infection that can be carried by dog ticks), but those both came back negative (thank goodness!!) and by today, he's almost his old self again...  

almost back to normal!

He doesn't have quite the energy necessary to keep up with Bisbee just yet, but everything else seems normal enough. We don't know what exactly happened to him, but hopefully it was some sort of a weird fluke and once we wean him off the steroid he'll stay his chipper, energetic self! (Like I wrote on one of those journal pages, 'it would be nice if we could all just be healthy for a while!') 

And now, a totally random photo: part of my snowman collection, decorating the niche in the hallway. Ariel keeps trying to jump up here and mess with them, so Tom had to arrange them across the front of the shelf as a barricade to stop her- lol!! (so far it hasn't really worked, either... she's such a stinker!)