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Also I wasn't quite familiar exactly the conditions Lem had so maybe you can break it down for me.

Hi Jen --

Sorry for the delay in responding -- I've just been buried at work lately.

Newfie maladies -- where to begin? 

Entropion is a condition where the lower eyelid is just too big, and it flops over - inward - and rubs on the cornea everytime the dog blinks.  Left unrepaired, obviously, it can eventually lead to serious vision problems from the damage to the cornea. 

Joint issues -- hips, knees, elbows, are all pretty self-explanatory.

Newfies also have a propensity toward SAS (sub-aortic stenosis), which is where one of the valves in the hear doesn't work quite right, and it basically will stick open, I think it is.  This can happen any time, and sometimes the episode will last a couple of minutes, but then it just starts working again and all's well until the next episode.  I understand there's really nothing you can do during one of these episodes, other than watch, and hope, and cry.  Luckily, we don't have that, and many breeders will euthanize a pup who has this (it can be tested for at like 8 weeks or so) -- other breeders will just give those pups away to good homes. 

The last one I mentioned was bloat.  It's most common in bigger breeds with deep chests, but Newfies have been known to have it (we had a friend that did, and lived to tell about it.)  Basically, I guess horses and cows can get it too, it's where the stomach fills up with gas and flips over on itself (that part's actually called "torsion").  It's a fatal condition, in a very short time frame if you don't get t the vet, and even then, it's an approx. $5000 surgery with uncertain odds.  I guess the intestinal tissue begins dying quickly, because it doesn't get any blood flow.  But there is a pretty simple procedure where they go in laparascopical ly and tack the stomach to the abdominal wall (actually they wrap it around a rib, too), so that it can't flip over.  Lem was going under anaesthesia anyway to remove a small anal polyp and for an exploratory look at the alleged third kidney (false alarm -- just a floppy second kidney that showed up in two different positions on an ultrasound), so we just had that done at the same time.  It's called a gastropexy.  When we had our male neutered, we did the same thing, since he was already under, and it's a pretty basic procedure. 

Those are the biggies that I know of. 

Again, sorry for the long post. 

Tad

Hi there --

Two pics attached (the other shots I have are larger than 600 Kb, so I can't post them, but I'm happy to e-mail if you'd like), but they're both when she was pretty young, so they're not very representative .  The first we took this during a bath session, and she was particularly unhappy with her station in life.  We just thought it was the funniest photo ever.  The second might give you a little insight into our girl's personality.  Put simply, she's a rip-roaring terror, and we wouldn't change a thing!

When we went to meet her at Mary Dewey's home, she was one of only two dogs from the litter left.  It was around Christmas time, and Clementine was about 10 or 11 weeks old.  She was ripping and tearing around the house, under the Christmas tree, up on the furniture, just everywhere.  Because she wasn't the normal puppy size, she couldn't exactly fit under the tree, but that didn't deter her at all.  She accidentally knocked several ornaments off the tree and intentionally pulled off another couple to chew on while we were there.  When we went outside to meet her mother (Wanda) and see them interact, Clementine kept jumping up and nipping at Wanda, clearly annoying her, until Wanda reached out and thunked our little girl on the head with a paw.  Slowed Clementine down for about 30 seconds, but then she was right back to full speed.  We were just exploring Newf breeders, because we had just lost a dog and weren't really ready to get another one, but we fell in love immediately and took her home a week later.  She still has those moments.  

We also have a male named Ruckus who is not quite a year younger (he was Clementine's birthday present for her first birthday), but Clementine is absolutely the alpha dog and regularly reminds Ruckus of this by kicking the crap out of him, despite the fact that he's considerably larger, stronger, and faster.  Her favorite game is to pile-drive him into the ground on his back, then stand over him making snarling, growling sounds and gnawing on his neck.  Then she bounces (literally -- all four feet off the ground (the ACL surgeries clearly went well)) away a couple of feet and waits for him to try to get up, at which point she hits him like a runaway freight train and the whole bit starts all over again!  He's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, because it's been two years now that they've been playing this, and he still doesn't get it.  But they both are lost without the other.  At doggie day care, he follows her around and does whatever she does (she's the queen of the joint -- just ask her), but on the few times when she's been there alone, she's half the dog she normally is.  She needs him every bit as much as he needs her.

When I looked at your photos, I could see some definite similarity in the eyes, but not so much in the nose.  Clementine has a longish nose, relatively close set eyes, and more energy than any other three Newfies combined, so I like to joke that she's really a Lab in disguise, which really pisses off my wife.  She's got a beautiful coat and the prettiest brown eyes you have ever seen, and when she walks she holds her tail up and partially curved over her back and sways her rump from side to side -- 100% woman.  I like to say that she "shakes what her momma gave her."  She's about as wonderful as you could ever want her to be -- sweet and affectionate and playful and ornery and smart as a whip.  

She's also small, about 105, and we keep her really thin because her hip x-rays are not good (but we've also got her on preventative glucosamine, and so far, she's doing great).  She's also blown up both her ACL's, and we've had TPLO's on both.  She's also been spayed, and at one point we had reason to believe she had a third kidney (long story) so we had her laparascoped (turned out to be a false alarm), but we had her gastropexied (tummy tacked to her abdominal wall so bloat is out of the question) while the doc was in there.  She had entropion when we got her (frankly, we're pretty sure that's why she was still available from a kennel as storied at Dryad), and we got that fixed right after we brought her home.  Turns out the procedure is the same one that Cher has done anytime she wants to eliminate those nagging little wrinkles around her eyes.  Fitting for our little princess.  Add 'em all up, and she's had five surgeries in her first three years -- she's been quite the expensive project.  Her nickname is "Lemon" (shortened to "Lem") for obvious reasons . . .    But she's an absolute trooper -- the Unsinkable Molly Brown of Newfies -- and there's nothing we wouldn't do for her.  

Anyway, sorry for the long post and my fawning over them, but they really are the lights of our lives, and once I get started, it's tough to get me stopped.  We also have a 16 month old daughter and two cats, and we consider them all to be siblings of varying degrees of furriness.  Couldn't imagine life without any one of them!

Tad