It's been a long time so I thought I'd stop by for a quick update.
Rhubarb is doing well. No major gouty flare-ups this fall and winter. Just some light barbering at her wrists and over her crop. She only needed her soft ruffle collar for about six weeks this season... a huge improvement over past years.
She's playing with toys more now and has even tolerated decreases in her medicine dose. We're at 0.35 ml twice a day instead of the 0.45 ml morning and evening that she needed for the first year after her kidneys almost shut down. It may not seem like much but going from 0.9 ml to 0.7 ml is almost 25% less medicine every day.
If her uric acid blood levels remain stable when we check again next month, I'll back her off the meds a little bit more.
Maybe by next Christmas she'll be down to once a day medicine time!
Here she is in all of her cockatoo-ee cuteness:
Bath time is (finally!!!) fun... so long as a hooman provides a steady fine mist.
Corks are the best! (Aka look at dem legs... they're amazing!)
Supervised preening after wearing her soft collars for a couple weeks means lots of downy pins to pop... Fluffy fluffy floof time!
(Sometimes she's so focused on barbering that even supervised interaction with scritches isn't enough to prevent feather chewing. So she stays in her collars until she can preen normally while supervised... then on and off as needed until she's back to her normal self.)
Rhubarb is doing well. No major gouty flare-ups this fall and winter. Just some light barbering at her wrists and over her crop. She only needed her soft ruffle collar for about six weeks this season... a huge improvement over past years.
She's playing with toys more now and has even tolerated decreases in her medicine dose. We're at 0.35 ml twice a day instead of the 0.45 ml morning and evening that she needed for the first year after her kidneys almost shut down. It may not seem like much but going from 0.9 ml to 0.7 ml is almost 25% less medicine every day.
If her uric acid blood levels remain stable when we check again next month, I'll back her off the meds a little bit more.
Maybe by next Christmas she'll be down to once a day medicine time!
Here she is in all of her cockatoo-ee cuteness:
Bath time is (finally!!!) fun... so long as a hooman provides a steady fine mist.
Corks are the best! (Aka look at dem legs... they're amazing!)
Supervised preening after wearing her soft collars for a couple weeks means lots of downy pins to pop... Fluffy fluffy floof time!
(Sometimes she's so focused on barbering that even supervised interaction with scritches isn't enough to prevent feather chewing. So she stays in her collars until she can preen normally while supervised... then on and off as needed until she's back to her normal self.)
She looks fantastic, and I hope she continues to improve!
