Dear History: Please Don’t Repeat Yourself, For The Love Of Beloved Dog

Tags

animals, bloodwork, cancer, cpl, dogs, health, limping, pancreatitis, pets, symptoms, tests, veterinarian

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I love my dog.

I love dogs, period.

When I was little I begged my parents for a dog. First they gave me goldfish, and when I managed to kill them off thoroughly they decided our family was ready for a pet that couldn’t be forgotten about.

His name was Shadow, and I adored him.

I mauled him about constantly and he tolerated my excessive affection with great forebearance. When I was 10 I trained him to walk nicely on a leash, and I worked very hard to teach him to play dead. He eventually would topple over from a “down” position with a big long-suffering sigh.

He adored my father, and when Shadow passed away, it was one of the only times ever saw my father cry.

As a child I spent a lot of time worrying that my parents would euthanize Shadow while I was off at University. Unfortunately, when he was 8 years old he had several large fatty tumors removed.

Shortly after, he began to limp.

The vets couldn’t find a thing wrong with his feet. After a lot of medications on his paws had failed, a biopsy revealed that his liver was excreting toxins through his sweat glands in his paws, causing the discomfort.

Within a few more months he had wasted away.

He died on the same day as Princess Diana.

His loss hit me hard. I loved him deeply, and I grieved his loss in a way that I have never grieved the loss of a human being. 8 years after he died, I woke up from a bad dream about him, and when I realized that it was a dream, I burst into tears – because my dog was dead.

When I graduated university, I got a new dog. I specifically picked a sheltie who was a different colour than Shadow, so I wouldn’t feel like I was “replacing” him.

That dog healed eight years of pain in a few short weeks. I no longer cry for Shadow. I love him in memory, but memories of him no longer cause me pain.

They’re nice memories.

Beloved Dog is now 8 years old, and I don’t know where the time went. It seems like the 8 years between Shadow’s arrival in our family and his painful exit were very, very long. But Beloved Dog was a puppy mere minutes ago.

Beloved Dog has started to limp.

This, combined with a couple of other nebulous symptoms that my friend The Farm Fairy clubs under the heading of “Ain’t Doin’ Right”, led me to take him to work with me and say,

My dog is limping. I need you to tell me that he doesn’t have cancer.

I got a laugh from people, but not when the vet looked at my dog.

My boss found that he looks anemic, but his bloodwork says he’s not anemic. She found that his abdomen seems painful, but he isn’t vomiting or having any diarrhea. His blood chemistries indicate normally functioning organs.

Except for one.

The spec cpl test is specifically designed to test dogs for pancreatitis. Normally panreatitis is an insanely painful condition brought about by fatty diet and not enough exercise, and is indicated by vomiting, diarrhea, and sheer misery.

My boss suggested it because it was all she could think of to explain the discomfort in his tummy, and because if there was inflammation in his organs, it might explain why he looks so pale.

It came back indicating pancreatitis.

So I fasted him for 24 hours, fed him on white rice for three days, and kept Owl and his fistfuls of cheese well away from Beloved Dog. I retested him for pancreatitis and it came back abnormal AGAIN.

So I changed his already low-fat diet to a corn-free diet, feeding him dehydrated fish with fruits and vegetables. I added digestive enzymes to his food.

He doesn’t look old, does he?

His paws began to show sores from his constant licking and chewing.

I took him in again yesterday, and the other vet, who has a very good ear, identified a mild heart murmur. Is that new, or is it so mild than no other vet has ever spotted it before?

The other vet, who reminds me of a Hank Azaria character, also thinks Beloved Dog looks anemic. He insisted on rechecking the red blood cell count.

Normal.

We rechecked him for pancreatitis.

Abnormal.

WHAT IS GOING ON?

I’ve sent his blood to the lab to get a more detailed report. They’ll be able to tell me whether my dog’s pancreas are just a LITTLE funky or a LOT FUNKY.

I’m trying to tell myself that just because Beloved Dog is the same age, and showing some of the same symptoms, does NOT mean the Beloved Dog has cancer.

It doesn’t help that my Aunt is dying of cancer. I’m flying home on an emergency visit to see her again, because apparently she’s wasting away fast.

It doesn’t help that today is Shadow’s birthday, or would have been, if he had lived to be 24 years old.

I just need Beloved Dog to be okay.

He says he just needs me to take off this damn cone.

Feed Your Pet Vet Food, Or You Will Pay… Literally.

Tags

animal health, animal nutrition, bladder infections, cats, dogs, Feline Lower Urinary Tract Disease, FLUTD, health, nutrition, pet health, pet nutrition, pets, uroliths, veterinarian, veterinary diets

After reading about poor KellyKel’s cat on the DoCo, I feel the need to make this post.

Please feed your pet veterinary diets.

Especially if you own a boy cat.

There is startlingly little regulation of pet foods, and some of the ingredients in pet store and grocery store pet foods are frankly harmful to your pet. Cats especially are at risk because their health is very delicately balanced on their diet. Cats eat a very high protein diet, and this is rough on the urinary tract system. If a cat lives to be 20, one day its kidneys will wear out and that will be that.

Cat’s bladders tend to develop crystals when the pH balance of a food is even slightly off. The crystals scratch the bladder wall and bacteria begin to grow. This is called Feline Lower Urinary Tract Disease. Vets refer to it as FLUTD (“Flutey”). It can happen to dogs, too, although it is rarer. Still, I have seen it! The crystals end up getting stuck together in that mass of crystals and blood and bacteria and white blood cells and they end up making a little stone. Sometimes (particularly with neutered male cats because their urethras are narrow) that stone gets lodged in the urethra and blocks the passage of urine.

From that moment on your cat has maybe 24 hours to live. Unable to pass urine, the toxins back up in the animal’s system and begin to kill your pet. Your pet will die either from the poisons that they can’t get rid of, or their bladder will BURST inside them. It’s painful. It’s deadly. It’s COMMON.

This isn’t something that is fairly rare. It’s something that actually fairly likely. If you walked into your local vet clinic and said “do you have a blocked cat in the back?” chances are they would say “yes,” and if it’s a big clinic, chances are they will say “yes, which one are you looking for?”  You want to scare a vet clinic? Call them and say “my cat isn’t peeing”.

There are a million reasons why a cat will get crystals. Stress is a factor. Dehydration is another (it is more common in cats who are eating dry food and don’t like drinking water)… and diet is yet another.

Many diets are poorly pH balanced. Not just your cheap grocery store foods (although they are the worst offenders) but expensive pet store foods, too. Being pricey doesn’t make it good, or safe. I have seen several pets come in with crystals caused by food, and they were eating a (WET!) high-end pet store product, boasting all-natural ingredients.

Pet owners look for phrases like “all natural!” “grain free!” “No additives!” “with fibre!” “with real chicken!” and so on.

They never think to look for “with a balanced pH for your pet’s urinary tract health.”

But if you have a male neutered cat, that is exactly what you should look for, because when your cat blocks, you have a choice. A vet bill totalling nearly $1000 or more… or a dead cat. If you choose “dead cat” you still have to choose between your cat dying in extreme agony or paying for a euthanasia.

It’s a bad scene.

Why does it cost so much to unblock a cat?

First you have to sedate the cat, because sticking a catheter up a blocked urethra into a bladder that is as turgid as an over-filled balloon is hideously painful AND difficult.

Then you have to keep it sedated until waking it up is no longer a cruel thing to do.

Then you have to give it antibiotics for the infection, and blood tests to see how badly poisoned the cat is.

Then you have to keep that catheter in its urethra for several days, draining the bladder of its brown or red infected pee.

You also have to keep the cat on drugs to relax the bladder so it won’t go into excruciating spasms.

…and that’s if the case isn’t too bad.

You may have to operate to get a larger stone from inside. This is more common with dogs. Check it out (yes, this is from my OWN experience, these aren’t pics off of the web):

Yeah, that big white thing? That's a stone. IN A DOG. A female bearded collie if I remember right.

IT WAS IN A DOG'S BLADDER

Sometimes they can’t unblock it. Then they have to cut off the cat’s penis. This is not a choppy-chop operation, because you’ll screw up the urethra if you do that. It’s delicate surgery, and often one that vets don’t like to do – they’d rather call in a specialist or at least a vet who has experience with them. You basically do a sex change operation on the damn cat, so it pees like a girl. That’s REALLY frigging expensive. It’s a long operation, so there are sedation drugs and anesthetics and veterinary time (I’ve seen three vets all pending over one of these surgeries). There’s the long recovery, too.

It sucks.

So… you can feed your pet a diet from the pet store and hope for the best… or you can buy a veterinary diet because all veterinary lines are pH balanced to prevent such problems.

A veterinary diet for a healthy animal isn’t even that expensive. They have high quality ingredients (my favourite brand, Medi-Cal, is all naturally preserved, too) and research-driven formulas and they never change the recipe without warning you (which other brands do all the time).

Your pet will poop less on a veterinary diet because there aren’t any fillers (unless, of course, you buy a high fibre formula designed to make your pet poop more!) and you end up needing to feed a lot less because they are so highly concentrated. Veterinary diets often end up being CHEAPER than the cheap grocery store stuff, and that’s before the $1000 operation to save your cat.

Oh, and veterinary diets are 100% guaranteed.

Remember those pet food recalls? I know someone whose cats were eating the cheap stuff. One died, the other has permanent kidney damage. It took thousands of dollars to save it. The owner has never seen a dime from that company.

But the veterinary diets called our clinic and told us which formulas were tainted (and there weren’t many, because only a few specialty formulas had gluten in them at all). Then they told us to phone every client who bought those food in the last three months, and they would refund the money spent on food over that time frame. Then they paid to test each animal who ate those foods for signs of poisoning. Then they paid to fix the poisoned animals.

Next time you’re in your pet store, ask the clerk if your pet’s current brand of food guarantees their food that way.

Just in case.

Maybe I need to get me a veterinarian

Tags

Alzheimer's, deprenyl, DHA, dogs, H1N1, intelligence, IQ, omega-3, pregnancy, puppy food, research, science, senility, swine flu, vaccine, veterinarian, veterinary medicine

I was speaking to Perfect Girlfriend the other day on the phone through my snuffles and wheezes, and she worried out loud about the swine flu, since BC has more than its fair share of cases. We started talking about the vaccine, and I mentioned that there has been a vaccine out for dogs for months.

“For dogs. For DOGS?” exclaimed the aspiring doctor, “We’re still waiting on it for people, but dogs get one?”

That’s the thing, though. Dogs get all kinds of stuff that people don’t. Animal science, in a lot of ways, is much further advanced than people science, simply because it’s easier to approve medication and testing for dogs than it is for people. If another thalidomide thing happens, but to dogs, people don’t lose as much sleep at night.

For example, take Anipryl. Generically named deprenyl, this drug has been around since the seventies. They use it for Parkinson’s and depression in people. But in dogs, they use it for Cushing’s disease and for senility. That’s right. In dogs, cognitive dysfunction closely resembles Alzheimer’s in humans (similar plaques on the brain) and they have a treatment for it, which works. The creator of the company which makes Anipryl is actually a Parkinson’s patient/researcher who thought that deprenyl was the most miraculous drug evar. He found that preliminary studies showed that it actually reduces the overall effects of aging. That’s right, it’s a life-extender. It actually makes animals live longer, although apparently it mostly works on male rats rather than females. Something to do with dopamine? I dunno.

Anyway, the FDA was having none of it so he founded the veterinary drug company because they CAN use it on dogs. They have been treating dog Alzheimer’s (it’s VERY common in older dogs) with this drug since 1992. It’s still not  approved for use in humans for Alzheimer’s, although studies keep going on indicating that it really might help people too, and I think some doctors are beginning to use it as off-label use.

So your dog can have its senility cured, but your grandmother? Not so much.

Then there’s the DHA thing. Recently, everyone’s been talking about DHA. Recent studies have revealed that DHA is even better than Mozart for making babies smarter. Mothers who take DHA supplements (usually cod liver oil – remember your mother forcing that stuff down your throat? Blech) during pregnancy end up with babies whose IQs are higher, who are better at problem solving, and have better hand-eye coordination. Suddenly scientists realize that there is DHA in breast milk but not in formula, and they are now thinking that this explains why breast-fed babies tend to be 6-10 IQ points higher than formula fed babies. So of course now formulas are rushing to add it and advertise it.

The pet industry has known about DHA for forever. Iams has been boasting about it in their commercials recently, that they have the “smart puppy” omega-3 supplements in their puppy food, but actually, the veterinary diets have put DHA in their food for a long, long, time. This is one of the many reasons why I made a point of feeding my Beloved Dog a veterinary diet when he was a puppy just five short years ago… and then resolved to take omega 3 supplements when I was pregnant!

Then Iams started adding it in their food and doing a bunch of studies which they published with much noise and clamour, duplicating what the Waltham Centre and Hill’s had found out long before: puppies whose mothers ate DHA enriched food while pregnant ended up doing much better on intelligence tests. For example, 68% of DHA enriched puppies were able to learn to recognize symbols which indicated the direction to go in order to find food, while only 30% of non-enriched puppies could do that. Studies also found out long ago that DHA was essential for proper eye development in rats.

And it’s not like they didn’t connect it with humans. They did. Notice that this abstract is from 1980. I wasn’t even born yet. But do you see how cautious they’re being? Basically they’re saying “So, apparently fatty acids are associated with bigger brained babies. Interesting.” Why weren’t companies like Similac looking into this thirty years ago? I don’t know why it took thirty years for them to start advertising it to the world at large, but I know one thing – the veterinary industry knew it, and took advantage of it without any qualms.

Hell, even pregnant mothers know this instinctively. When Perfect Girlfriend was pregnant, she developed cravings for seafood. It was like her body was saying “give us the fish oil! BABBY NEEDS FISH OIL.” But instead, thanks to our throwing mercury about recklessly and poisoning our waters, mothers are advised to avoid eating too much fish during pregnancy.

Anyway, my point is, when it comes to the cutting edge of science research – your vet hears it first.