Primus spent all day at the vet yesterday, getting fluids intravenously and generally endearing herself to her caretakers. When I left for work she was unwilling to move and pretty listless. When they brought her into the treatment room to see us (ten hours since I'd left for work) she was almost entirely normal. She climbed into my lap and generally cavorted and snorted about.
X-rays showed nothing, other than that her intestines were empty except for a last bit of stool (she hadn't eaten for more than 24 hours) which she got rid of shortly after getting home. All good, but still no real sense of what was wrong with her. All of her blood work and urine testing had returned to normal levels and her temperature had dropped somewhat to 103.4 degrees. She didn't seem to have any of the mosquito/tick born stuff, and so we were left with something far more serious, or something like the flu.
She had been given various things including antibiotics to help with any thing bacterial, but as with humans, if it was viral, there's not much to do except let the body kill it. We're hoping she just got some weird stomcah bug, though there is a naggin part of my mind that wonders how to explain her apparent joint stiffness. Perhaps we just imagined it having settled on Lyme almost immediately.
So last night she wasn't allowed to eat or drink for which she was mighty annoyed. This morning she didn't want to walk very far, so clearly she's not even remotely back to normal, and she seemed to have a fever break. Dogs can't sweat of course, so after a bout of chills, she started to pant without having exerted herself or being in the sun.
She got to eat half a serving of food and was given access to water, and also got the first dose of various drugs to treat her symptoms. She seems to be doing quite well.
Hopefully we dodged a bullet and $1000 later have a perfectly healthy dog again.
Thanks to all who expressed their kind thoughts. I'll post more if it's warranted.
4 comments:
I don't want to start throwing out hackish ideas of what might have been wrong. Obviously, she was in the care of trained vets.
But if I had those same things happen to me, I would suspect food poisoning.
Anyway, glad you've got your dog back.
Not hackish at all. Food poisoning is my first thought whenever I get sick. Over the last five years I would guess that every time I've been sick it's been as a result of funky food. I don't think I've had the flu or anything like it in a decade. The facts just don't add up. Anyone who tells you they had a 24 hour anything had food poisoning. We just don't realize how common it is.
But as for Primus having food poisoning, I'm less convinced. She certainly eats the occasional oddity while out on walks, and any of these things could trigger an onslaught of food poisoning but...
For me food poisoning goes exactly like this:
Step 1 - I start to feel tired and achey.
Step 2 - I really feel tired an achey and need to lay down.
Step 3 - a fever starts
Step 4 - an uncontrollable need to evacuate from top to bottom as it were comes over me, all the while sweating profusely.
Step 4 - evacuated and less sweaty, I start to improve almost immediately.
Primus had nothing like explosive diarrhea or vomiting - she had soft stool and threw up once (3 days ago) after taking some medicine.
It may have been food poisoning, but it doesn't fit with my understanding of how that plays out.
Sudden, poisonous barraging of the kidneys that they couldn't keep up with at first, but eventually washed out?
Really good to hear that Primus is feeling better.
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