Dill and Lyme Disease

A lot changes in a year. All the hope wrapped up for Dill and hooked on handler Mark Bettis crumbled in front of our very eyes. Let's just say that Dominique and I thought Dill would benefit from Mark's talent and Mark needed a dog like Dill. Why we thought rescuing a human from the fall out of his life was our responsibility-especially when it came to the quality of life of our dog...life's misjudgment # 599 I guess.
Dill got diagnosed with Lyme Disease in March of 2012-not Mark'e fault. Dill spent the next 7 months  in Michigan with Mark, and lame on and off. I had a suspicion that Mark was not treating Dill with the antibiotics he was given. We had no proof. Unbeknownst to us, Mark lost interest in the dog he had touted as the greatest Briard he had seen. Dill slid into neglected oblivion at Mark'e kennel, untreated and uncared for, depressed and cranky and obviously in pain. Mark would not return my phone calls-over 50 of them.
The clarifying moment was in October when a friend traveling from Mark's direction on the way east, offered to pick Dill up and bring him home for us. Dominique and I were ready to bring him home and let him live his life out here with the best pain management we could find. Obvious to us was that Dill had some chronic condition that could not be fixed.
Kent met Michaela, Mark's wife at the time, and retrieved Dill and his little paper bag of pill vials full of antibiotics. Full pill vials? Mark was shipped two bottles of pills 9 weeks prior, with 60 pills. Those pills should have been long gone. Michaela didn't know enough to hide them, toss them or flush them. She was raising their baby and basically uninvolved with Mark's dog management. Lucky for us that in that one serendipitous event, we learned more than we could have otherwise known. Dill had never been treated for the Lyme Disease and it was still raging inside of him.
The last insult was the horrible coat condition Dill returned in. From multiple reports after the fact, the dog was living in a concrete run (the last thing you'd do with a lame sore dog) felted with matts. He came back with matts and holes in his coat and front leg coat, pastern coat and hock coat 1/8 inch long.
Funny thing. The day after Dill returned he was started on 60 days of Doxicycline. By a month later there was no evidence of lameness. There has been none since.
2013 has produced a healthy dog in Dill. So far this year, shown by Regina, he has won 22 Group Firsts, 3 Best In Shows, a specialty and 6 Reserve Best In Shows(and countless other group placements). What a difference a healthy dog makes.