Corn Dogs

I’ve mentioned before that Blue is a half-brother to Fox.  Fox is the elder statesman of Grammy’s two hairy children.  Fox and Blue share the same mother (dam), Royal Dream. 

As an aside we’ve searched all Blue’s life with us for a photo of Royal Dream.  She is (maybe was at this point) owned by Janice George.  We’ve tried contacting Janice a few times but she’s never responded.  We’ve searched for hours on the internet on the chance that maybe there was a photo of her posted somewhere, for some reason.  So far with no luck.  If anyone out there has a photo, or knows Janice, we throw ourselves on your mercy since living with this insatiable curiosity is killing us!  We hear that Royal Dream is/was a favorite of Janice.

A Fox Corn

But back to Blue and Fox.  Fox has suffered from corns for a number of years.  He gets them frequently and on just about all his feet.  We typically Dremel them down or pad them.  Various home remedies for corn removal have been tried but essentially without success.  Since they only seem to bother him from time to time, Grammy has taken a live and let live attitude with respect to the corns. 

Taking my cue from Fox, I watch Blue like a hawk for any of the maladies that have afflicted poor Fox (and the number of said maladies is not insubstantial).  Since they share so many of the same genes, and they’re so alike in personality, I’m very afraid they will also be alike with respect to their health.  One of the things I have always done is check Blue’s feet for corns.  So far we have been all clear but I always expect to see one someday since Blue is one of the lumpiest and bumpiest dogs I know. 

So it was with a mixture of surprise and a sense of “I knew it!” that I picked up Blue’s foot the other day and saw on one of the pads of his left front foot a fairly well developed corn.  I pressed on it and fiddled with it a bit.  It didn’t seem to be causing him any discomfort.  I hadn’t noticed a change in his gait. 

And so I had to face it.  The moment I had been expecting had arrived.  I have always harbored an absolute belief that Fox is the model for Blue’s aging patterns.  Blue is a year behind Fox in age but so far in much better shape than poor Fox at each stage.  Yet I still harbor the belief and fear that Blue will follow his genetic heritage and suffer all the things that have challenged our poor Fox.  I don’t let the fact that Blue has exhibited almost none of the issues that Fox has suffered so far get in my way.  I just know in my gut Blue is going to fall apart in the same way Fox has.

Blue's feet, corn and blueberry muffin free

And here was this corn.  The very first sign that the downslide has begun.  It’s a short hop, skip and jump from there to wasting away to nothing, a victim of Alabama Rot as Fox currently is.  I had been dreading it.  I had been expecting it.  I had been looking for it.  If you seek, so shall you find.  The implications of this turn of events were weighing on me.  I spent the afternoon pondering what was going to happen to Blue and how we would deal with it.  I was planning all sorts of medical and hospice type scenarios. 

With sad resignation I decided to carefully note the location of this very first corn.  This harbinger of doom.  This horseman of the apocalypse.  I got Blue in an area with good lighting and lifted his foot up.  I got right down in there and took a good look at that corn.  Only it didn’t look like a normal corn.  I fiddled with it some more.  It felt like a corn.  I looked even more closely.  It definitely did not look like any corn I had seen. 

I reached out again and began to scratch at it.  At first nothing happened but the more I scratched at the edges of it, the more it began to crumble away.  I finally loosened it to the point where it popped off in my hand.  What the…? 

The harbinger of doom apocalyptic corn turned out to be a dome of some unknown substance (my money is on blueberry muffin) that stuck to the bottom of his foot and hardened there.  Because of Blue’s newly developed concern about walking on our linoleum floors, I had begun spraying his pads with a product made for show dogs.  It makes their feet tacky so that they have a grip on the flooring of typically slippery show arenas. 

It has helped him with the floors and apparently also helped in cementing a blueberry muffin crumb to his pad.  So it looks like Blue is not dying.  He is not currently exhibiting signs of the creeping crud.  He has not started the same sort of slide that Fox has undergone.  Yet.