Mr. Buddy Rose - American Staffordshire Terrier Part XVIII

(Parts I-XVII of Buddy's story are posted below. If you would like to read them in chronological order, start at Part I. You may need to click "Older Posts" at the bottom of this page. Thanks for continuing to follow the story of the remarkable Mr. Buddy Rose.)

Friday, October 8, 2010
Did you see the movie Ground Hog Day? That's sort of how I feel as we are going through many of the same things we experienced in late June and early July.

Mr. Buddy Rose has had a great week. He has started to play again and is sleeping less. Sunday, we will once again lower his dosage of Prednisone to half. He will get a 10mg. dose every other day for a week and then we talk to the vet again. We may need to take him back to the vet and have his reflexes re-checked. Watching Buddy's reflex response test makes me feel bi-polar. We've seen this test so many times. His response can either break my heart or make me extremely happy.

His walking is still improving. He is still having some trouble with his front legs. One of them is worse than the other and seems to turn under when he stands, until he corrects it. This same leg may be causing him to stumble occasionally, although the stumbling seems rare. When Buddy first started walking, from crawling, the pads on all four feet became raw because they hadn't been walked on in so long. Now, he is trying to compensate for whatever is going on with his walking. He has developed two raw spots on the inside of his pads on both front feet. I can only equate it to how our shoe soles wear, based on how we walk. He is walking differently because he is wearing his pads differently. They will toughen up, like they did before, but I really would like to know why his walking has changed. Could pain be causing him to walk differently?

I, once again, being scared to let him lose momentum when he is walking, have allowed him to become a total leash maniac. He is stronger and is again pulling me around all over the neighborhood. He had come so far with his leash training. I really hate that we have lost that ground. Yesterday, I told him to "heel." He must have misunderstood me because he immediately dragged me 15-feet to the closest tree so he could urinate on it. Maybe he won't forget everything he had previously learned. It is time I start taking control of him again. The general public is scared enough of Pit Bulls. They get even more scared when the Pittie is dragging the human walker behind them. If they were already thinking "out of control" Pit Bull, seeing him walk me surely supports their theory!

In a little over a week, Mr. Buddy Rose has 58 "likes" on FaceBook. I am familiar with about 25 of Buddy's fans. Several friends suggested his page to their friends, others have just found him through other venues. Most of his fans are from the United States but he does have fans in Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Taiwan and Turkey. He is becoming quite the popular guy in his own virtual reality.

He surely is THE popular guy in real-life!