Poor Mason!!!

Mason at 8 weeks

Mason at 2 1/4 years

Mason had his 2 year shots today and boy did we get a lecture! Mason is a very active pug but as you can see from the pictures above he has gained A LOT of weight. Mason was the runt of his litter and now holds the record for the largest (both tallest and biggest) pug our breeder has ever bred. At the vet today Mason weighed 34.6 lbs!!!! The healthy/average weight for a pug is 20 lbs - and the vet said that was being generous because he is a large pug. So, needless to say, Mason is on a diet - no more people food, no more treats of any kind and special diet food. I have to take him in once a month to be weighed until he shows he is making progress. Basically it is weight watchers for dogs! The tricky thing is that exercise is out of the question until fall because pugs cannot handle the heat well (they have no room to breathe since they don't have much of a nose). The vet was nice but stern and now it is up to us to help Mason slim down and live a long, healthy life!

In other Mason news....at about 7:00 pm last night Mason started running around our house like a mad man which, if you know Mason, is very strange (he is more of a sleeper). We thought he was just being playful until he then started rubbing his face on anything and everything. So, his nurse mommy and doctor daddy thought "hmm...something might be wrong." Actually we just wanted him to stop so we called him over to where we were and noticed that his whole face was swollen! He could barely open his eyes, his muzzle was so swollen he could not close his mouth, and his neck was swollen too! We called to vet because he had just been there for shots and he thought it sounded like a reaction to a bug bite. So, what did we do ... we drugged him!!!! 100 mgs of Benadryl later (50 mg at first and then 50 mg more a couple hours later) and Mason is back to normal! That much Benadryl never even put him to sleep - he just wandered around the house like he was so tired but did not know what to do! I think it was the worst day of Mason's life - thank goodness it is over!!!