Smokey Mountain Breakdown

I'm interrupting this Happy Sunday to let everyone know that the famous Fat Buddy is very ill. My blog readers won't be as familiar with Fat Buddy's fame, but he is quite well known in Cocker Spaniel Rescue circles.

I was fostering Fat Buddy for the Hilton Head Humane Association in South Carolina as a special needs dog. He has pemphigus and had an appointment with a vet to be put to sleep when he came into my care. That was in 2001. Since I'd done such a good job of rehabilitating him, he came with me to Tennessee as a permanent resident of Rosie's Cocker Rescue Referral.

If you enjoy the Breakdown and my writing, you owe a debt to Mr. F.B. My first forays into story writing started with the Fat Buddy Stories that were told on the Cocker Spaniel Rescue lists. These were short little Factlets detailing Fat Buddy's prodigious badness. Let's see...there was the famous battle for the steak sandwich...which I lost. There was his Garfield-esque love of pasta. There was Fat Buddy, Egg Burglar, and the Dreadful Retribution of the Ganders. Stories about the extensive efforts to Fat Buddy-proof my home...and Fat Buddy's uncanny ability to thwart those efforts. The dog has stolen and eaten 5 pound bags of sugar and flour, countless packages of meat, entire jars of peanut butter and once, an entire watermelon...really, too many items to list. He's constantly getting food packaging stuck on his head. He's dastardly clever. When the rest of the gang are begging at the dinner table, Fat Buddy first scopes out the kitchen to see if I've perhaps left a rib roast within easy reach. He's dug up rows of seed potatoes and eaten every cucumber and radish in my garden. Actually, not every radish...he has a strong preference for French Breakfast radishes. I have fought an ongoing losing battle for years to keep him out of the groceries.

Given his appetites and legendary sweet tooth...it's not surprising that he now has a dreadful anaerobic infection in his mouth. I've had him on ampicillin and it looks like that has failed. I'm starting him on doxycycline as soon as the shipment of that drug arrives. If that fails we will have to move on to the much more expensive clindamycin. Essentially, I've been working night and day for the past week rinsing his mouth with chlorhexidine mouthwash, applying warm compresses to make him more comfortable and administering antibiotics in an attempt to get the infection under control. He's pretty miserable. Still eating...just not chewing.

What he really needs is a dental. My vet has given me a procedure estimate of between 347.26 and 460.46 to have the little scoundrel's teeth fixed. He's probably going to have to have all of his molars removed. I need to raise at least a third of that amount to have the procedure done.

If you'd like to contribute toward's Fat Buddy's procedure, you may donate through paypal either through the blog or to my email address: rosiewlf@gmail.com. Alternately, you may donate directly to my veterinary clinic:

Dr. Sandra O'Connor, DVM
Cedarwood Veterinary Hospital
101 Hedrick Dr., Newport, TN 37821
423-623-4362

Just reference "Rosie Griffeth's Fat Buddy".

If you have a fax number and would like a copy of his estimate, I'll be happy to fax it to you.

Happy Sunday!

Da Fat Buddy