Tinker's Surgery & Mike's Computer Died

Tinker's had a large lump on his right side at the bottom of his rib cage for several months. It didn't appear to bother him and we had decided to not have it removed unless it started to give him trouble. Tinker took the matter out of our hands the first of this month when he licked the lump until it opened and started to drain - Yuck! So another trip to Sebastian Animal Hospital to see our vet Dr. Slade and to schedule the surgery. His technician drew blood to check to see how Tinker would handle the surgery and to see if there were any underlying problems. His blood work came out fine especially for a 13 year old dog. 

Tinker had another lump between his chest and right front leg (his armpit) that had developed years ago and had slowly gotten larger, but never gave him a problem. So we decided to have it removed also and he needed to have his teeth cleaned. 

Tinker came out of the surgery really well and a week later we took him back to the vet to have the staples removed from his side and the steel sutures removed under his right leg. 

Tinker had to wear an Elizabethan collar before and after his surgery. We bought him a padded vinyl collar and he did really well with it. 

The week before Tinker had his surgery, Mike's laptop wouldn't boot up one day. So after several different tries and ways trying to get it to boot up, I ended up taking it to a local computer shop. The hard drive was corrupted or dead and we had to have a new hard drive installed. The bad news was that the data on the original hard drive couldn't be recovered. What made things worse, was the fact that his computer hadn't been backed up. I had asked Mike sometime back about backing it up, but he said he really didn't have that much on there that was important.

WRONG!! When we were on our trip out to Utah, we had a small camera mounted on the dash of the car and took movies of our drives to and through the national parks. Mike would copy the movies each night from the SD cards to his laptop, and now they are all gone!! I
hadn't even seen most of them yet. The only suggestion the computer shop technician had was to see if a data recovery company could recover the files and he said that could really be expensive. 

Of course, recovering the movies would be cheaper than making another trip out to Utah. We'll see. It's already been an expensive month - $1024 for Tinker's surgery and teeth cleaning and $215 for a new hard drive for Mike's laptop and loading Windows 10 on it. The lesson for this is - I should always listen to the little voice in my head that said to backup his computer after we got back home.

The rest of this month was pretty routine. We pruned some of our plants and cleaned out a flower bed. We both had lab work done by our primary physician and follow-up appointments - our lab results were fine, so we're good until our next routine appointments.