Happy Dashain!

Nepal still hurts my heart.

My thoughts turn to it again every year around this time. October was the most beautiful for many reasons—is still, I assume, even though I’ve been gone now for 6 years. When my Nepali friends share photos in October, it especially tugs at my memories.

October means Dashain, Nepal’s largest annual festival, going on now, I know. It also means Tihar—known as Diwali in India—just a couple weeks later, nearly as important, and even more lovely to me, with all the beautiful lights.

That’s also when we adopted our Nepali dog—she must have been born in early October, I guess, or late September, because we adopted her at the end of October, when she was estimated to be about a month old.

AND as if all that weren’t enough, October is also just a beautiful month in Nepal in general—just after the monsoon, so the air is still quite clear, but the clouds are gone, and you can expect cloudless days with no rain. Gorgeous. Typically not too hot, or too cold, from what I remember—it was just my favorite month in general.

No wonder there are so many wonderful celebrations scheduled then.

Of course Nepal has interesting holidays throughout the year, like many lands, but, hands down, October is my favorite. I’m reviewing my Nepali again, and the bit of Hindi and Sanskrit I learned as well; I’m reading yet another version of the Ramayana and more on the region in general. And I say again:

Dasaaiiko Shubhakamana!

Birthday Bash for Alaska

Do you remember Baby Alaska?

She was incredibly, improbably, cute.

You just GOTTA love the baby!

And yet, somehow, when she was just three weeks old, she and her sisters were abandoned in a box, with no mother in sight.  And yet they were lucky, even so.  They were abandoned at the front step of one of the directors of the KAT Centre, the Kathmandu Animal Treatment Centre, the only real organization… in all of Nepal, as far as I know… that is devoted to caring for the many street dogs that live in Kathmandu.  She and her sisters were placed in their own small enclosure, with blankets and space to play, with meals of rice and shredded chicken lovingly prepared and offered to them.

Then we arrived, in a desultory search to resolve the problem:  “Honey, the kitten is too old.  L’orange is a cat now.  I need something to nurture.  Either we get a baby soon, or we need to find a puppy.”

Our attention was drawn to a playful and very cute puppy that was about three months old.  But she was a bit too energetic for me–and when I peered into the cage of the small puppies, a tiny face emerged from the pile, those serious dark eyes and that gleaming white muzzle, peering up at me curiously, and I knew I was in love.  I instantly thought, “Uh-oh, this is the one!  But she’s so little!”

Unlike every single shelter in the US, the workers urged us to take a younger puppy over an older one.  “The older ones, if we have to put them back on the street, they’ll be okay.  But the little ones… this isn’t really the place for them.  Too many dogs come in here; it’s too easy for them to get sick.  But they’ll die alone.  They really need to be in their own home, with someone to take care of them.”

So we thought about it… and gave in.  And carried home a tiny bundle of squirming, whining puppy.  She was obviously quite scared, to be parted from her sisters for the first time, to be put in a car, to be taken somewhere totally different.

And I swear, she was so young she was still toddling.  Seriously–watching her walk was like watching any two-year-old baby.  She shifted her weight too hard from foot to foot, looking like she always just barely caught herself in time before toppling over, with every step.  And steps in our multiple staircases were just absolutely awe-inspiring to her.  Each step was bigger than she was.  When we put her at the edge of them, and walked up or down away from her, to see what she would do, she sat down and cried, with clear puppy whines.  She didn’t want to be left alone.  But she had no idea how to climb up or down something that was honestly as big as she was.

Then she got a little bigger.  Not much–but just enough.

Well, I suppose I am as big as each step now, almost...

Baby Alaska becomes brave, and tackles stairs the same size as her.

And then, suddenly, just weeks after we’d brought her home, she was horribly sick.  She reverted back to being a far more helpless baby than she’d ever been.  Live as long as I might, I’ll never forget those hours of sitting on the floor, cradling an eight-pound puppy in my arms, singing slow carols to her like “Lully, Lullay” and “Silent Night” in a faltering voice, my fingers resting against her fragile ribs and feeling her heart beat a crescendo against my fingertips.  As she recovered from the terror of a seizure, and then another, and then another, all apparently triggered by her lethal combination of worms and giardia and, worst of all, parvovirus.  She couldn’t keep anything in her system.  Her glucose and salt levels were abysmal.

And then, just as suddenly, she was better.  And like any healthy, normal puppy, she kept growing.  And growing.  And growing.

Until the stairs weren’t such a challenge, anymore.

Well, if I'm bigger than them now, I might as well eat them...

And then I started looking at the calendar, and realized she must have been born in the last week of September last year.  So she was now one year old.

Really, mommy? Are you sure I'm already a year old? But I still feel like a puppy!

Nepali of the Day:

khukur:  dog

ek barsha:  one year

janmadiin:  birthday

Thulo:  large

saano:  small

U biraami thiyo:  She was sick.

Ahile, u sanchai chha:  Now she is well.

Hotel Green Park, Part II

Remember this place?

In the Himalayas above Pokhara, the first rays of dawn illumine Macchapucchre

Yes, Nepal.  I live here.  Remember, that’s a lot of why the puppy has been so sick.  Kathmandu sanitation not so good.

(Again, today, Alaska’s marginally better, still happy and playing and stomach slightly improved.  Hooray medicine!)

Back before our little Alaskan Himal got so sick, we spent a few days away from her gazing at the massive Himalayas all around Pokhara.  And I put up a post about the exterior of the Hotel Green Park, where we stayed.  Here’s the companion post, for its interior.

We actually stayed in two different rooms while we were in Pokhara.  Apparently, since we arrived later than they expected on our first day there, they’d assigned the room reserved for us to someone else.  The next day, they offered to move us into their nicest room.

Really, the two rooms weren’t that different.  And they were neither awesome nor terrible.  The “nicer” room had a better view of Macchapucchre Himal, though the view from the first room had been impressive enough.  It also had an actual tub in the bathroom, as opposed to the simple spout and drain for showering in the first room.  Still, both cost only about $20 a night, and at that rate, absolutely nothing in the US could beat them.

The queen-sized bed in our room at the Hotel Green Park. There was also a double bed against the opposite wall.

The bed was a little too hard, but not so uncomfortable as to keep us from sleeping.  The sheets and blankets and pillows were clean, and warm enough even in the chilly nights.  (There was neither heat nor air conditioning, but there was a ceiling fan that cooled things off nicely in the heat of the day.)

A coat hanger, chairs, and working color TV with cable.

The TV worked fine — except, it was initially missing a remote.  When we let them know about the problem, instead of bringing us a remote, they brought us a different TV… with a remote!  Both TVs functioned just fine, with good quality images, and I watched a Bollywood movie and parts of various soap operas in Hindi.  We also watched CNN and the BBC.  Quite a luxury for us, since we can’t even get television signals in our house here in Kathmandu!  (We live far enough outside the city center that the cable lines don’t yet run this far.  Apparently, we live in the urban sprawl part of Kathmandu, where productive farmland lay not too many years ago.  I do feel a twinge of guilt over it, though we didn’t build the house here or even pick it out, and we’re certainly crowded in with plenty of Nepali neighbors on every side.)

The most… interesting… part of the hotel room was the bathroom.  Ants had somehow tunneled their way up to it, though we were on the third floor.  And the room wasn’t quite clean enough for my standards, and the toilet splashed alarmingly with every flush–good to make sure the lid was down before touching the lever!  But, again, for $20 a night, it wasn’t bad.

Um, the mirror's cock-eyed, and so's the toilet lid... but everything works!

Yes, there's a bathtub too.

So, overall, for $20 a night, in Pokhara, Hotel Green Park’s definitely a decent place to stay!

Nepali of the day:

himal:  snow-covered mountain

bahira:  outside

bhitra:  inside

kotha:  room

sutnu:  to sleep

sutna kotha:  bedroom

charpi:  bathroom/toilet

Puppy Update, Times 3

What? You mean I'm STILL sick?

A brief addition to the puppy saga–we took her to the vet again today.  We also took a little baggie with evidence of why we thought she was still stick.

Sure enough, after looking at her stool sample under a microscope, it was pretty clear that she STILL has giardia.  And I learned that I was wrong about the disease–it’s not bacterial, but actually caused by a protozoa.  I learned that because I was surprised when we were presented with a bottle labeled “wormex” even though the report from the vet tech clearly said there was no more evidence of worms.  Turns out the medicine was also formulated to kill off the protozoa that cause the trouble in giardia.

Read more about the disease and the protozoa that cause it.

So.  She does have another medicine, too–I think it is an antibiotic–and I may even get organized enough to type up the names of both medicines tomorrow.  For now, I’ll just note that she’ll be on one for 2 days, and the other for 3 days, and the vet thinks those really ought to finally wipe out the infection.

On the bad news side, I hear getting rid of giardia can be sort of difficult.  On the good news side, the vet is convinced that she’ll survive now–she’s just uncomfortable with the giardia infestation, so we’ll treat it until it goes away, and then she should finally be strong enough to get the vaccines she was scheduled for a month ago.

Puppy Update, Revisited

I apologize for disappearing for so long–you must have thought something terrible happened to the puppy.

The truth is the opposite.  She has steadily continued to get better, and she has been back to acting like a regular puppy for over a week, playing with her toys, annoying the cats, wagging her tail like crazy and dancing around and trying to jump up to greet anyone she sees for the first time that day–or after an absence of, say, two minutes.

The remaining trouble is that she still has persistent diarrhea.  No solid stools since before she got sick, though she’s been wormed, has gone through a round of antibiotics to fight off the giardia, and surely has defeated her parvovirus–because, as I said, she’s not only still alive, but obviously feeling better and pretty darn happy.

But we’ve both been exhausted from looking after her.  Last night we finally implemented a *brilliant* idea, and got to sleep through the night for the first time since before Thanksgiving.  (Now THAT’s something to be thankful for!)  Before last night, I really had no clue how long it had been since I’d slept more than four hours at a time… and I’d gotten the four hours straight only the night before that.  Mostly, none of us in the entire house were managing more than three hours of sleep at a time.  That may not bother the cats much, but it’s surely not good for humans or puppies.

The poor puppy did have one more seizure, too–last Tuesday or Wednesday; I’m a tad fuzzy on exactly when, except that it was again in the middle of the night, circa midnight.  And half asleep myself, I was frantic, and, even though the seizure was definitely the mildest of the bunch, and she quickly relaxed afterward, I hardly slept myself.  Instead, I pulled her into bed with us and put my hand on her tiny ribcage so I could feel her breathing.  After having read that following a seizure a puppy’s lungs could sometimes fill with fluid, so that they’d choke to death–one sign of which was pale gums, which she had–I worried about her, and I worried even more when I caught her cough twice.  But she slept that night better than I did, and she hasn’t suffered seizures since.  Pale gums are also a sign of anemia, and with her eating better, and taking a vitamin supplement twice daily, her gums are being restored to a more normal red-pink, and she seems stronger.  No more hypoglycemia.

But as for the sleeping–she has the runs so bad that even when she wakes in the night and immediately cries to go out, she often can’t wait.  So she messed her crate several times, and needed middle-of-the-night baths to clean her fur, before we got the brilliance to adopt yet another idea I found online:  puppies with diarrhea should immediately be released from their crate training, until they’re better, at least.  Now she’s sleeping on the floor of our tiled bathroom, with the bottom half of her crate covered with newspapers to make a warm, semi-soft bed that can easily be cleaned.  And when she needs to make a mess, yes, she makes it on the floor.  That’s easier to clean than her and her crate.  And the bathroom is right next to our bedroom, where we can hear her if she cries, and she even has her own space heater to help keep the room warm.

She’s quite a pampered Nepali street puppy.  If she weren’t in a house and being regularly seen by a vet, delighting in a specially cooked diet of chicken, rice, puppy food and yogurt, I know she wouldn’t have survived this long.   The adult dogs who live on the streets here must have remarkable immune systems–they eat garbage, live exposed to the elements, and somehow face all the numerous ailments that spread so easily here (rabies, distemper, mange, along with endless stomach ailments).  But, even though our little Alaskan Himal hasn’t had a mother since she was three weeks old, and she’s faced three problems many Western dogs never have to face in their entire lives, she’s now made it to three months old.

And she’s growing–she’s now about the same height and length as the cats.  Considering, at five weeks old, she started out a third their size, that’s quite an improvement!

Sigh.  It’s nearly 11 again.  And one full night of sleep isn’t enough to make up for two or three weeks without it–off to bed!  But maybe, just maybe, I’ll manage to upload a picture of her soon?

Maybe not feeling 100%, but playing!

Parvovirus

Yes, I know, yet again, for multiple days, I’ve disappeared.  For good reason.

So you know about the little puppy, and have eagerly awaited more pictures of her.

But for the past few days, she has been horribly, horribly sick.

She’s had diarrhea for a while.  We’ve tried various remedies–at one point when she was on an antibiotic, and her symptoms went away completely for several days, but they returned as soon as the antibiotic course was completed.  We spent multiple days trying to find a specific worm-curing medicine recommended to us, but we couldn’t find it, and we worried over her continued stomach upset.  And on Tuesday night, she again woke several times in the night, crying to go out.

On Wednesday night she woke having soiled herself.  After throwing up earlier in the day.  And on Thursday morning, even as I started making our Kathmandu-Thanksgiving desserts to chill before I started to cook the main meal… she threw up again, what looked like every fragment of her breakfast.

So we took her to a different vet, one of the most well-known amongst the expatriates here.  And he promptly ran a few actual tests on her.  And administered intravenous antibiotics, and fluids.  And we learned the puppy had a mild case of fleas, a stronger case of worms, a bacterial infection called giardia… and parvovirus.

The last scared me from the very name–I knew it only as one of those scary dog diseases that all puppies are vaccinated against in the United States.  And when I started searching for information about it online, I found that it seemed most people had the same impression of it:  even on veterinary pages, I found rehashes of the same basic information that looked like it had been pulled from a common textbook on pet care.  A basic overview of the structure of the virus itself, its mode of infection, a few sentences about its symptoms, diagnosis, prognosis, followed by multiple sentences underlining the importance of vaccination… and nothing else.  It looked like nearly all of it had been written by people who had never actually seen a dog with the disease.

Not quite all–a few sites spoke with the voice of experience, though they, too, tended to be brief, and never included actual case studies.  Parvovirus does occasionally still rear its head in the U.S., in the same group as our puppy:  very young dogs just on the edge of their vaccinations, who haven’t yet gotten them.

Here… well, it’s Nepal.  All sorts of scary diseases lurk everywhere–ground, air, and water combined.   For Pete’s sake, WE had to be vaccinated against rabies before coming here.  Yes, it’s that common, with the leagues of street dogs, not to mention the occasional wandering monkeys.  Go read Water, Water Everywhere for info about our distiller–we forbid even the pets to drink the tapwater here, or, even worse, from the occasional standing puddle in the yard.

It’s a wonder the puppy didn’t have something worse.  Basically, in my reading, and from the vet, I learned several things about parvovirus:

• Yes, it’s a virus, untreatable–but the danger is in secondary problems, which can be treated.
• Untreated, the virus causes death in 80% of dogs
• Treated, the statistics reverse, and 80% survive–good we had her diagnosed!
• The virus tends to run its course in 3-5 days (we’re on 4, thank God)
• If a dog doesn’t show improvement by day 4, it normally doesn’t survive (she is improving)
• The disease symptoms include foul-smelling, bloody diarhea and frequent vomiting
• The virus attacks the intestinal lining, causing both problems above
• The virus can also shut down white blood cells and weaken immune response
• The biggest danger is how the virus weakens the dog–most die from dehydration, or because a secondary infection takes advantage of the dog’s weakened immune system to do its nasty work
• Even if a dog is improving, sometimes they abruptly die, and no one really knows why.
• Even if a dog recovers, it’s possible for the virus to have first hidden itself in the heart, where it can reactivate months or years later, triggering a heart attack and sudden death.
• Even if a dog does completely fight off the disease, they often tend to be mildly weak and sickly for the rest of their life.

So our puppy’s situation looked fairly bad–but not not awful.  Some scary things could happen; her risk of dying peacefully from old age just went down.  On the other hand, her chance of dying immediately wasn’t impossibly, terrifyingly high.  At least she didn’t have rabies.

Yesterday I caught her foaming at the mouth.  Twice.

And in the evening, in my husband’s lap, she went into convulsions–a full-blown grand mal seizure, jerking and drooling and losing control of her bowels and urination.

We were horrified.  As she came out of the seizure–after a minute or two, that, like the expected Kathmandu earthquake, seemed to last hours longer–I raced upstairs, found the card from the vet, and called his cell phone, even though it was nearly 9 PM.

And he answered promptly, calming me down.  “Yes, sometimes we see this in parvo puppies… her body is very weak… her liver may not be working well, and sometimes they have seizures… keep her warm and still–she may want to run around, but don’t let her–don’t give her any more food or water tonight, but the antibiotic is okay, if it’s due… call me in an hour and let me know how she is.”

I sat on the floor of our bedroom with our puppy wrapped in a towel in my lap, singing her Christmas songs like “Silent Night” and “What Child is This?”  When I was a child myself, I’d learned from several pet cats that having a human hold them and sing lullabies could be just as comforting to a pet as a it was to a baby.  It worked on the puppy, too, helping her calm down–she was tense, her eyes terrified, with good reason… she’s barely 11 weeks old!

A few years ago, I thought I’d been frightened holding a sick kitten on the way to the vet, with him oddly rigid in my arms, drooling and unresponsive although undoubtedly alive and softly crying out… My own heart had stopped when the vet told us he had a congenital heart disorder called cardiomyopathy… Even when he was treated and allowed to come home with us, when he lay around listlessly and with a bloodclot in one leg causing it to literally rot, the fur falling out and the skin decomposing… oh, when I held him in my arms while my dad unwound the bandage on his leg, applied an ointment, and applied a fresh bandage, every day for too many days… my ears rang with the horrible sentence of “even if he recovers, we’ll probably have to amputate the leg… but then he could maybe live anywhere from 6 months to 2 years…”

That cat tried to shorten the time even more, lying in his bed and refusing to move, looking at me with pained, empty eyes when I tried to interest him in food.  He couldn’t have said any plainer, in English, “Don’t you see?  It’s just not worth it.”

Until, finally, the day that I enticed him with a strip of beef (yes, Nepalis, I’m sorry you’re horrified, but it’s true) from an Arby’s roast beef sandwich.  And he finally looked at me like he was cross, the message in his eyes changing to, “Oh, all right, if you insist.  But it won’t make any difference.”

He ate after that day.  Miraculously, his leg healed.  And, though my horror at all this had been increased by watching it happen in a kitten barely 10 months old… that cat is now going on 8 years, and–while he has needed daily medication–he’s been robust and healthy ever since.

I had all this running through my head as I sat on the floor holding our puppy.  And her age was even worse, barely 2 months.  She’s so tiny–she shouldn’t have to suffer.

After less than an hour, our vet called US.  And we reported that the puppy was sleeping in my lap, having passed from scared to slightly more relaxed.  He repeated to not give her food or water overnight, and call him again in the morning.

At midnight, I gave the puppy her antibiotic and took her outside.  She’d slept until then, and again until about 1:30… when she abruptly suffered a seizure again.

We found a fresh towel to wrap her in, surface-cleaned the other one, then ducked it in the washing machine with a healthy dose of bleach… and she cuddled against us and slept again.  Until 3 am.

Again.  But even worse–this one seemed stronger, and after it seemed to have finished, she abruptly stood rigid and began to bark and bark and bark and growl, her eyes still glazed as they’d been during the main part of the seizure.  But then the noises stopped–or rather, changed to low whines of fear and pain.  And she lay down and curled up again, returning to herself with her eyes more terrified than ever–and almost guilty, like she thought we’d be mad at her, as if she’d just been hollering horrible swear words about us like a child with Terrettes.

We again changed the towel and again cuddled her, but she didn’t relax as easily–she whined softly to herself, even bursting into the occasional miserable howl, until she finally couldn’t resist falling asleep again.

And… yes, again.  At 5 am.  But not as bad as before, shorter and without the uncontrolled barking.  Still, she again softly cried to herself for a while before she could sleep.

At 7:30 I wakened with the vet again calling us to inquire how she was.  We reported, and–following on some more online reading I’d done during the night–I mentioned that I was afraid she might have distemper, too.  He told us he had a testing kit, and to bring her in to be looked at… but he also reiterated that “because their liver is affected” parvo puppies could sometimes have seizures during the worst day of the infection, and he suspected she was in it.

Our puppy heard me talking on the phone, but she stayed exhausted enough to sleep until 8:30, and I wasn’t about to move her before then.  When she got up, I took her out, gave her the antibiotic, and we rushed her to the vet.

But, strangely, she seemed to be feeling pretty well.  She stood and wandered around on her own, wagging her tail and looking for food and toys and petting.  The vet found she now no longer had any fever.  She was still dehydrated, but not as badly.  And we’d reported that her diarrhea had been subsiding yesterday–so he again affirmed that she seemed to be recovering well, and–aside from the seizures, which could have another cause–showed no clear sign of distempter.  So we should continue her antibiotic, finally give her the worming medicine, and keep increasing the amount of food she was eating, as the seizures could be brought on by “hypoglycemia,” or low blood sugar, brought on by the stomach upset robbing her of nutrients and us restricting her to small meals as we let her digestive tract recover.

So we fed her a larger meal at home, and she seemed playful and happy again, though sleepy…

…until 11:30, when, just before she was due to eat again, she yet again suffered a seizure.  But, again, it was relatively mild, maybe not as bad as any that had come before.  When it ended, for the first time, she kept wiggling and refused to sit still–finally, after 15 minutes, we set her down in the kitchen with all the doors closed and, vaguely unnerved, we watched her pace through circles at a fast walk.  I’d read that some dogs did that after seizures; I’d also read it was better to prevent them from doing it, but I wasn’t sure how, and as I resumed my reading, she finally settled and let Sean hold her again, and was asleep the next time I saw her.

And then the afternoon began–and, at first every half-hour, then every hour, I offered her food.  She’s eating the strangest recipe.  Initially, the workers at the KAT Centre where we adopted her had recommended a diet of minced chicken, rice, and warm water for her until she got bigger (remember, she was just 5 weeks old when we took her home, and already separated from her mother for 2 weeks–they warned us then that her immune system would surely be weak).  Her latest vet, when we took her in on Thanksgiving, recommended a diet of 1/2 teaspoon of a medicine containing yeast, 2 teaspoons of plain yoghurt, and 2 more teaspoons of water, to help increase her hydration and the amount of good bacteria in her system to fight off the bad.  When she’d returned on Friday for her final administration of the intravenuous antibiotics, he’d recommended continuing the same diet in larger doses, with increasing levels of normal puppy food mixed in… and, too, somewhere along the way a vet visiting from England had recommended an electrolyte drink for the puppy composed of a half-teaspoon of sugar and half-teaspoon of salt added to water.

So I’m now combining all of those–the yeast, the yoghurt, the water, a spoonful of rice, 2 or 3 spoonfuls of minced and boiled chicken and chicken liver, a pinch of sugar, an pinch of salt, and a sprinkling of puppy food that increases slowly with each mini-meal.

And our puppy is feeling much better.  It’s after 8 pm; she’s had no more seizures.  Instead, she’s eaten up every morsel of food… until around 4 o’clock, when she decided hourly meals were too frequent, and she was fine to wait and eat again around 5:30.  She has enough energy to run off from us outside and try to lap up up the dirty puddle we try to keep her from.  She has grudgingly accepted a bowl of plain distilled water instead.  And her sides have more of a healthy bulge–not as sunken and skeletal as she has been–and while she still has diarrhea, it’s firming and she’s excreting the icky-inch-long worms that the worming medicine she took this morning has killed off.  As the afternoon went on, she began to curl up with us to nap more comfortably; until then, early in the afternoon, she tended to cry between one meal and another, trying to go into the kitchen, though I kept her meals small to keep from overwhelming her system and making her throw up again, which she hasn’t done since Thursday.  Now she’s again napping on my husband’s lap, after another mini-meal.  And I know from the last time I checked her that the too bad signs that vets have pointed out to me have instead now improved–when I lift the loose skin behind her neck, it snaps back down before I can say “One Mississippi,” so she’s no longer dehydrated.  Her gums are steadily becoming more of a rosy pink, so her anemia and hypoglycemia should be fading, her liver functioning better.

She’s not well yet.  We’re keeping a close eye on her.  But she’s doing much better.

I hope she’s even better tomorrow!

First Halloween in Kathmandu

In my update post of a few days ago, I overviewed four major things to update:

1)  Getting the puppy

2)  Nepali Tihar festival

3)  Halloween

4)  Pokhara

(1) and (2) have already been posted on… it’s long enough from (3) that I think I may just save my pictures of it for next October.  There’s not too much to share for it anyway–as I also mentioned in the overview post, we were both sick throughout the last half of October.  The being sick ranged from a flu-like thing that never wanted to end, to an instance for both of us of general tummy trouble, including vomiting.  The “flu,” we’ve been advised, was probably caused by our allergies going insane from the dusty air here now that the monsoon season is over, leading to miserable secondary sinus infections; we’re now both on daily allergy medicine and breathing just about normally.  The tummy trouble could have been anything from an actual virus going around (several of our friends and coworkers had problems around the same time) or something caused by food, which is REALLY common here; in any case, that’s cleared up nicely, too.

The Halloween-related point is that we didn’t actually do anything for Halloween.  We were invited to three different parties, and were too sick to attend any of them.  The only pictures I have are of our own household decorations.  But at least we did celebrate the day some on our own–all October I read a book of H. P. Lovecraft’s creepy stories, including “The Call of the Cthulhu,” and what I personally [and apparently at least some critics agree] think was even scarier, “The Color Out of Space.”  And we watched the first episode of “Carnivale” and some Simpsons Halloween episodes.  But that was all.

Then, on November 1st, we fussed about getting the puppy set up with our household guard–who really likes her, and plays with her and pets her both.  And, with suitcases packed, we headed for the Kathmandu airport…

But since the internet’s not cooperating this evening (it keeps dropping out for no reason), I can’t upload any pictures, so I’ll wait until tomorrow to add some more.  And maybe add at least a couple of Halloween-themed pictures here?

In honor of Halloween, giant bats soar over the Kathmandu foothills of the Himalayas!

Think I'm joking? Look carefully at this picture--it's not out of proportion. There really ARE giant bats in Kathmandu, and they like to sleep upside down in the trees near Thamel. (But, no, the ones in the previous picture weren't real--though this one is!)

Puppy Update:

Due to great interest, I’ll add a paragraph or so on the puppy daily, or at least any time there’s something new, ok?

The puppy now has a name.  It’s what I mentioned before–“Alaskan Himal.”  But mostly we’re still just calling her puppy, occasionally interspersed with “Alaska.”

She’s learned how to sleep through the night!  On Friday I was up until 2 am, and took her out then — but she didn’t wake us up at all, even though we slept in until almost 9 on Saturday.  Then, last night, too — she went out a final time around 12, and didn’t wake up until we did at 7:30.  This is MUCH better than taking her out three times in the middle of the night, which we used to have to do.  The first week she lived with us, she seemed unable to go longer than about three hours without waking up and whining desperately to be let out of her crate and carried outside.

During the day, too, she’s making less messes in the house–and when we’ve left her in the laundry room while everyone was gone, on two separate evenings over the last few days (for a total of over 9 hours, combined) she’s only made a single mess overall.  Instead, she waited patiently until we were home to take her out.  I think she’s diligently working on that getting housebroken thing!

Dinner and a Puppy

Today, for the first time, we were actually invited to eat dinner in the home of one of our Nepali friends.  The food was delicious!  And endless!!!

Just what they brought out as appetizers would have been enough for a wonderful meal.  A typical vegetable tray, with carrot sticks and celery, but also including strips of radish–and while before coming here I would have said that I don’t like radishes, Nepali radishes are really very good.  And there were two different kinds of amazingly spiced bits of chicken, and an absolutely fabulous appetizer called chaat–on the plate, it looks like a breaded potato, and on one level that’s what it is.  But it’s better.  It’s actually mashed potatoes seasoned with herbs and a dash of chili pepper, rolled into small balls, then covered with breading and fried.  Yum!

And all that was before the main meal.  Delicious chicken soup, seasoned tofu that even my husband liked (and he usually swears he doesn’t like tofu), another kind of herb chicken with an amazing sauce, mushrooms in yet another remarkable sauce, and the obligatory component of every Nepali meal:  daal bhat.  That is, cooked lentils and rice.

Actually, most Nepalis eat daal bhat for most meals.  They like the routine, just like I once went through a phase of living on chicken nuggets and my sister went through a phase of subsisting on cheese.  The food is so common that the phrase itself means a meal.

But for a Nepali feast, there are limitless other dishes to prepare.  My husband and I have yet to try one of the most famous restaurants in Kathmandu, where for a set dinner they bring out over thirty courses.  A great way to sample a variety of Nepali foods, yes, but also a good way to get a tummy ache!  Even after just today, I’m stuffed.  But it was really good.

And while we were gone to dinner, the puppy was really good, too.  In about five hours, she only made a single mess in the house.  She’s already quite good at understanding that as soon as she hits the grass outside, she’s supposed to do her business.  Since she’s so little, I’m amazed she waited so patiently to go out, but she did.  And then, after she came back in and we played with her for a while, I left her with Sean and went back up to the third floor to retrieve her food dish, which had been in the laundry room where she’d stayed while we were gone.  And after I finished cleaning up her one mess, and turned around… there she was, dancing around my heels in the goofy puppy way she has, her eyes even more shining than normal, as if to point out, “Lookie what I did mommy!”

I’d never before seen her make it up the single set of stairs to the second floor.  And yet there she was on the third floor, having mastered the separate stairs up to that floor, too, and all in the couple of minutes I’d been up there.

She had to descend the stairs more carefully, with me just a couple of steps in front of her, ready to catch her if she slipped — she slid multiple times on the shorter series of steps outside when she was learning to navigate them.  But she was indeed very careful, stretching down her front paws and shifting her balance some, then bringing down her back paws and resting a moment, tail wagging, before daring the next stair.  And she made it all the way.  Quite a feat, considering each step is taller than she is!

Of course, she’ll be harder to confine to a single floor at a time, now that she knows how to get up and down the stairs, but she’s growing up!

Sorry, no pictures today.  It’s almost 1 am, and I’m tired.

Sean just carried the puppy in here to say goodnight, and when he held her out to me, she licked me on the nose.  I think she might like me…

Nepali of the Day:

Khanaa khanubhayo?:  Have you eaten?… literally, but it’s also just a really common greeting, like “How are you?”

Khaaee:  I’ve eaten… again, literally, but as a response to the greeting it’s like, “I’m fine.”

khanaa: food

daal baat:  generic phrase for any meal

bhaat:  cooked rice

chamaal:  uncooked rice (you would never eat this!)

daal:  lentils, or any of a remarkable variety of sauces with a lentil base

khukurako maasu:  chicken meat

ko:  ‘s (element that makes a word possessive)

khukura:  chicken

khukur:  dog (don’t confuse with the above!  Nepalis don’t eat khukurko maasu either!)

KC Casey, et al?

No.  You see, it really doesn’t work as a title.  I’m afraid we’ll just have to stick with the cats.

But yes, there is now a puppy in the house, too!

I'm the baby. Gotta love me!

Both my husband and I always had dogs while we were growing up.  But we couldn’t keep them in our dorms in college, and after we got married we lived in apartments without enough space for anything but a toy dog.  And we’re big dog people — think, German Shephards, Labrador Retrievers, Collies — so instead we just enjoyed having the cats.

Then we moved to Nepal.  Where we are, to our extreme confusion, immensely rich.

Our house has three floors and a ridiculous number of rooms.  It’s surrounded by a decent-sized yard, and the yard is surrounded by an indecently-sized fence.

It took us about three days after arrival before we started murmuring at each other, “You know, we could get a dog.”

We hesitated for many moons.  We’re well aware that someday we’ll board another plane for an excruciating series of continent and flight changes in order to return to the United States.  It was plenty fun enough trying to transport two kitties with us through all of that — adding a dog into the mix seemed like an invitation for mind-altering trauma.  Leading to insanity.

But, with time, the scars from our travel here have begun to fade.  In their place, the ridiculous amount of personal room we enjoy has seemed to get bigger and bigger.  And, correspondingly, Kathmandu’s population of street dogs has seemed to grow.  Every time we see one eating from a garbage pile, we cringe.  And a couple of months ago we started pointing out to each other all the time, “Aw, look at that dog — it’s so pretty!” and “Oh, this dog following us is so sweet.  I bet it would go home with us…”

But that didn’t really seem like the best way to do things.  Far from pampered American pets they may be, but most adult Kathmandu street dogs seem quite comfortable with their lives.  In general, they’re healthy, and they trot down the sides of the streets with their tails wagging.  They curl up on doorsteps to sleep, and I’ve never seen anyone chase them away.  In fact, when the Kathmandu Animal Treatment Centre started rounding up dogs to vaccinate and neuter them, they encountered suspicion in many areas, from people who lived in the same neighborhood they took the dogs from.  No individual would lay claim to any street dog.  Nevertheless, the reaction of the community at large was along the lines of, “Hey, what are you doing with our dogs?”

The volunteers and veterinarians explained they were helping to prevent diseases and unwanted litters, and they continue to assure locals in each neighborhood that once the dogs they sweep up are altered, vaccinated, and disease-free, they’ll be returned back to the exact same street they came from.

So Sean and I realized that grabbing a dog off the street here might have been only slightly less insulting than stealing a dog out of someone’s front yard in the US.  Of course, since we knew about the KAT Centre itself, we finally decided just to go look.  We hardly needed to work all October, anyway.  Most of Kathmandu shut down to celebrate Dasaiin and Tihar.  We had nothing to celebrate but Halloween, so we had plenty of extra time.

And, coincidentally, a litter of 5 puppies had just been dropped off at the KAT Centre the day before we first went.  The staff estimated the puppies were only about 4 weeks old, far too young to leave their mother.  But their mother was MIA, and though they weren’t sure how healthy the puppies were, the KAT Centre staff took on the job of caring for them.  And made certain to mention to us that actually it wouldn’t be very healthy for such young puppies to stay at the Centre long-term, what with strange adult dogs coming in all the time; they’d really be better off in a home.

This is, of course, the opposite of the situation at most shelters in the US.  There, the puppies and kittens rapidly get adopted, while the dogs and cats sit in cages for long days, until their time is up, and most are euthanized.  Here, the adults are considered strong enough to return to the streets only a few days after coming in, whereas little puppies would be much better off in the home of someone who would care for them.

We decided to think about it, and came back the next week.  That morning, two of the five puppies had been adopted.  We studied the other three — and when the little white one poked her nose over her sister’s back and peered up at me with baby-ish black eyes, very young and happy and interested in everything, I already knew I wanted to take her home.

So she is here, and has been with us about a week and a half.  She’s very tiny!  When we adopted her, the staff at the Centre reminded us she was only about 5 weeks old.  She’s had stomach trouble off and on — when we took her to be looked at by a vet today, they told us nothing very serious was wrong (no temperature, no sign of infectious disease or worms), just that we’d started feeding her kibble too early.  At the Centre, she and her sisters and all the other dogs had eaten rice mixed with water and shredded chicken; at home, I’d fed her rice mixed with water and kibble for a few days, and when she started ignoring the rice and focusing on the kibble, I stopped offering the rice.  Now, we’re trying to return her to mostly rice, made interesting with bits of chicken, for another few weeks before she tries Purina puppy kibble “weaning to three months” again.  If she had her mother still, she wouldn’t be weaned yet.  She needs very mild food.

The big question:  What’s her name?  Mostly, so far, we just call her puppy.  The day we got her, Alaska suggested itself — because of certain figures in the news, perhaps? — and because she’s such a snowy white, with only a bit of tan on her ears.  Then again, most people who adopt dogs here give them Nepali words for names, so Himal has suggested itself, too, as the word that literally means “snow-covered mountain.”  Lately, because we are weird, we are leaning toward giving our abandoned Kathmandu street puppy the luxurious name of “Alaskan Himal.”

Still, mostly, we call her puppy.  And, after all, L’orange got her excessively French name precisely because for the first few weeks we had her, we just called her, in English, “the orange one.”  So we’ll see.

The other big question:  How well does she get along with the cats?  See for yourself:

Hmm, what is that the cat is leaving behind?

It's colorful! It jingles! It must be meant for puppies! (Um, why are the cats staring at me like that?)

Either this is proof that Regina is promiscuous, and will sleep with anyone... or else she sorta likes the puppy.

In short, the puppy was in the house less than a day, with much staring of cats at closed doors, before the cats managed to gang up on a door and force it to open enough to look nose-to-nose at the puppy.  When she tried to chew on ears and tails, Regina swatted her twice to teach her manners… and then let the puppy curl up with her for a nap.  For several days, L’Orange mostly spent time staring at this totally new creature apparently unlike any she’d ever seen, and she’s recently started trying to figure out if it’s appropriate to play with the strange creature as if she’s a kitten.  With two interested cat mommies, she may just end up growing into a respectable cat one of these days.