Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Louie's story, part 1: How it started

It all seems to have started with a bout of pancreatitis, back in February of 2007. In truth, it started long before then, and although the alarms were there and I tried to be proactive about getting him care, no one but myself thought there was anything wrong.

I started dragging Louie to the vet the previous fall, when he began licking his feet, and I thought he had allergies. Prior to this I had taken him in once because he had some blood in his stool, and once after that because I thought his eyes looked funny. Hard to say exactly how, but they just didn't look right.

With the "allergies" he also had red rings around the outside of his eyes, which I assumed were also part of the allergy symptoms.

None of the vets I took him to could find anything wrong with him.

At around the same time, his skin began to deteriorate. A hairless dog, he was becoming covered with blackheads and large bumps. I can assume now that these were from malnutrition, but at the time I didn't have a clue. The truth is that his skin had started looking bad several months prior to the onset of other symptoms, but I chalked it up to age. I chalked a lot up to age back then. I tried some of the remedies for bad skin that I had read about online, and I had tried some things that had cleared up similar problems in one of my other Chinese Cresteds, but nothing helped, and instead he just kept getting worse.

Sick of getting no answers, I eventually took him in to see a new vet about the "allergies" and was given a prescription for a medication with a small amount of prednisone in it. It seemed to help him for a few days, but then, one night in February of 2007, after eating a fairly large dinner, he began vomiting. He vomited all night, and between vomits he just sat in my lap, shaking. We went to the vet the next day and he was prescribed an anti-nausea medication and something else, I don't remember what. After two more days of vomiting up just about everything he ingested I was very concerned about dehydration, so we rushed him to the vet again. This time he was diagnosed with pancreatitis, and had to spend an evening in the hospital on IV fluids.

That was the start of a frantic six months, during which symptoms of several concurrent conditions would make it hard to tease out just what was going on with him.

1 comment:

  1. Our 4 year old Boston Terrier, BeBe, was dx with Primary Intestinal Lymphangiectasia last month after two months of sickness, Prednisone, antibiotics, testing, x-rays, lab work, etc. Her albumin was down to 1. Her vet sent her to the Emergency Vet Hospital for treatment because the earliest IM vet appt we could get was 2 weeks away. She didn't think she would make it that long. Finally, an ultra-sound was done, a plazma transfusion and exploratory abdominal surgery. Four deep tissue biopsies were done. She came home 2 days after surgery only to have to take her back 2 days later due to fever and digression. They gave her another Plazma transfusion, labs, etc and she is back on her feet. She is on RC low fat GI can food with a few RC low fat GI dry kibbles a day. She is tolerating limited dehydrated chicken breast tenders and boiled chicken. Oh and a bite of banana in the mornings. She is gaining back the 7 lbs she lost. Right now doing well. She gets a B-12 injection once a week and is not on prescription meds at this time. I also give her 9 ml of GastroElm in the morning and 9 at night. She gets 3 cc of Pro-Pectalin once or twice a day soon to switch to Proviable dc probiotics. I've learned a lot from your blog and am thankful I found it.

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