Monday, May 02, 2005
Taz and a torrid few weeks
Taz has been back and forth to the vets quite a lot in the last few weeks.
The first incident was Anna arriving home to be confronted by blood all over the floors and walls, necessitating a swift trip to the emergency vets at 11pm on a Saturday night. One injection, a box containing 2 antibiotic tablets and £113 someodds later we got to go home. We went to our local vets for another checkup and were relieved off another £30 odd.
A week later at 8am on a Monday morning we were awoken by a yowling and very distressed Taz charging around the downstairs and falling over, we assumed it was her blood sugar levels dropping too low and dosed her with honey and something to eat all the while calming her down with pats, strokes and our calming voices.
Thinking we could enjoy another couple of hours of sleep (Monday being effectively our weekend as we both work at the weekends these days - Anna hadn't finished until 11pm on Sunday night) we were awoken by Taz "howling" and yelping as if she had been very badly kicked or beaten. I knew almost automatically that it was more than her insulinoma and as she kept falling over and howling and charging around the house Anna phoned the Vets, they offered a slot in about 6 hours, which I knew was too long to wait, so we phoned back and they said to come immediately.
On arriving at the vets Taz was panting as if it was going out of fashion and howled quite a bit, on getting her into the consulting room we explained the situation, the vet took her temperature and immediately had us out into the back yard cooling her with cold water, apparently we were pretty lucky to have got her to the vets in time as he diagnosed Taz with Malignant Hypertherma, Taz had got too hot and couldn't control her body temperature and the panting just made things worse as she was burning up more energy than she was losing.
We got her cooled down and took her home, unfortunately our ability to control Tazzies "little episodes" by diet alone seems to be failing. A visit to the vets again on Tuesday is needed and Taz will either need to get steroids or have an operation. Both of these options are going to be dangerous for her, steroids will make an already fat dog fatter and an operation might be difficult as she is fat. One thing for sure the ability for us to feed her every 90 minutes or so is not something either of us is going to be able to cope with for very much longer.
The first incident was Anna arriving home to be confronted by blood all over the floors and walls, necessitating a swift trip to the emergency vets at 11pm on a Saturday night. One injection, a box containing 2 antibiotic tablets and £113 someodds later we got to go home. We went to our local vets for another checkup and were relieved off another £30 odd.
A week later at 8am on a Monday morning we were awoken by a yowling and very distressed Taz charging around the downstairs and falling over, we assumed it was her blood sugar levels dropping too low and dosed her with honey and something to eat all the while calming her down with pats, strokes and our calming voices.
Thinking we could enjoy another couple of hours of sleep (Monday being effectively our weekend as we both work at the weekends these days - Anna hadn't finished until 11pm on Sunday night) we were awoken by Taz "howling" and yelping as if she had been very badly kicked or beaten. I knew almost automatically that it was more than her insulinoma and as she kept falling over and howling and charging around the house Anna phoned the Vets, they offered a slot in about 6 hours, which I knew was too long to wait, so we phoned back and they said to come immediately.
On arriving at the vets Taz was panting as if it was going out of fashion and howled quite a bit, on getting her into the consulting room we explained the situation, the vet took her temperature and immediately had us out into the back yard cooling her with cold water, apparently we were pretty lucky to have got her to the vets in time as he diagnosed Taz with Malignant Hypertherma, Taz had got too hot and couldn't control her body temperature and the panting just made things worse as she was burning up more energy than she was losing.
We got her cooled down and took her home, unfortunately our ability to control Tazzies "little episodes" by diet alone seems to be failing. A visit to the vets again on Tuesday is needed and Taz will either need to get steroids or have an operation. Both of these options are going to be dangerous for her, steroids will make an already fat dog fatter and an operation might be difficult as she is fat. One thing for sure the ability for us to feed her every 90 minutes or so is not something either of us is going to be able to cope with for very much longer.
