Update on Beloved Dog

Tags

dogs, urinary tract infection, veterinary medicine

As some of you might remember, I was panicking a few months ago about the state of Beloved Dog’s health.

I posted a couple of updates afterwards on Twitter:

Bloodwork came back very definitive for pancreatitis. According to the numbers BD should be barfing everywhere and crying. So confused.

— Carol @IfByYes (@IfByYesTweets) May 11, 2012

Instead, he looks like this… pic.twitter.com/QvkTVl31

— Carol @IfByYes (@IfByYesTweets) May 11, 2012

Well, the upshot was that I decided to get him an ultrasound. 

The ultrasound specialist is a super nice guy, and he did a really thorough job on Beloved Dog. He said the liver looked good, no sign of “hepatocellular syndrome” which was what had caused my previous dog to limp. The pancreas looked normal (bafflingly). There were some nodes in his spleen which were “probably benign” but he aspirated them just to be sure. And he thought the bladder wall looked a little thickened.

“Has he ever had a bladder infection?”

“He had blood in his urine after he got into the Thanksgiving ham. I put him on antibiotics and he seemed better. I never got around to rechecking his urine to be sure.”

“Well, let’s take a sample just to see.”

So he took a urine sample.

The urine looked pretty clean. There was some blood, but since he took the urine directly from the bladder with a needle, that’s not unusual. No sign of infection. He also sends all his reports to a specialist in the states for a second opinion, and the U.S. specialist thought the bladder looked fine, so I thought no more about it.

The cytology came back as normal spleen.

So we just kind of dropped the diagnostics.

For some reason my dog’s blood keeps testing positive for pancreatitis, but he doesn’t actually seem to have it, or any kind of cancer that could cause it.

Then, on Saturday, he peed in the house. He was standing right next to Perfect Husband and he just started to go. Since he hasn’t done such a thing for years, I caught a sample and brought it in to work on Monday.

Blood.

LOTS of blood.

The kind that I qualify as “TNTC” because the red blood cells were too numerous to count under the microscope.

At the same time, there was very little bacteria, very few white blood cells, and no crystals. No signs, in other words, of an infection.

Dr. Azaria recommended a urine culture, but I wanted a sterile sample. Beloved Dog has a lot of fur, and I didn’t want to pay the lab a bunch of money to grow the bacteria from his penis hair.

The next day I brought Beloved Dog in with a full bladder, but before we had a chance to try and take it out of him, he peed on the floor.

We collected it just in case, but it looked like this:

Should pee look like tea?

“Maybe the floor was dirty,” I said hopefully. “It didn’t look like that yesterday.”

“I keep that floor clean,” said the kennel attendant indignantly.

Grand. My dog is peeing brown.

Now, I see a lot of urinary tract infections at work; in fact, at my clinic we just sniff urine and say “ugh, smells like UTI”. But my dog’s pee was a weird enough colour that even the receptionist remarked on it.

By coincidence, the ultrasound specialist happened to be coming in that same day, so he did another quick scan and collected a new sample, and he didn’t even charge me for it.

No stones in the bladder, no tumors, just that thickened bladder wall.

I’ve sent it away to culture, and in the meantime I’ve put him on antibiotics.

Hopefully his pee will change back to yellow soon.

One thing’s for sure – this time I am rechecking his darn urine.

Ouch.

Tags

coworkers, dog behaviour, dog fights, dogs, veterinary medicine, vets, work

I’ve always told people that dog fights rarely involve serious injury – most of them are just noise and posturing and some wrestling. 

I had to remind myself of that the other day when a dog, who looked like a cross between the Mastiff from The Sandlot and Cthulu, picked up my Beloved Dog and dangled him in the air by his neck.

There’s a shut-down school near where I live, and all the dog owners in the area use the old field by the playground as an informal off-leash park.

I like to take Beloved Dog and little Owl out there after work, it if isn’t dark by the time we get home.

There’s often another dog or two around, but it’s a big field so there usually isn’t a lot of interaction. Some bum-sniffing, posturing, and that’s it.

This massive dog was retrieving a ball the size of a beach ball for its owner, and the dogs mostly ignored each other until a toss of the huge ball took the dog near Beloved Dog.

Now, Beloved Dog has a bit of a small man complex around big male dogs, but he’s usually quite good with girls, and this dog, while humongous, was female. So all he did was walk up to her daintily, tail in the air, and politely stick his nose in her taint.

The dog, who was probably named Cerberus or something, whirled around, grabbed him by the neck, and hoisted him up in the air while he screamed bloody murder. For once, he was involved in a fight that wasn’t his fault.

I was a good thirty feet away and I didn’t react immediately. I was partially surprised because big dogs are usually less aggressive, not more, because when you weigh over 100 pounds, how threatened can you be by… well, anything?

Besides, like I said, most dog fights are a whole lot of nothing and getting excited just makes things worse. But Cerberus didn’t let go, and the owner began to panic and try to pry her jaws open and she wouldn’t let go.

I started to think about the exceptions to my dog-fights-don’t-cause-damage claim, like someone I know whose small puppy was killed at a dog park. From all accounts it sounded more like a mistaken-prey situation than a real dog fight; the killer dog treated the poor puppy like a squirrel or rabbit.

I also know an ex-service dog who tried to RETRIEVE someone’s sheltie, with disastrous results.

My sheltie was still dangling. Still screaming.

I started to run.

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.