Virgil

Well, we just had a two week hellish experience. It had to do with Brandi, our eight year old Labrador Retriever.

It started on Saturday the 14th, a typical Saturday morning where I take Brandi out for a early morning walk and usually end up over at my mother’s house about a half mile away. It wasn’t completely typical since I didn’t take her to an open field beforehand where I like to toss a tennis ball and she loves to fetch it. For a retriever fetching is a passion, and her hustle at racing after the ball, snagging it while it’s still bouncing, and then dashing back in full gallop reflects her doggish enthusiasm. I didn’t take her to that field that morning because for the previous several weeks she had been having a problem with one of her rear legs. The vet suspected a tear and had put her on Rimadyl, an anti-inflammatory, ibuprofen-type drug. So we went straight to my mother’s house, where my mother, typical for a Saturday morning, made Brandi a hardboiled egg. Brandi, in her usual fashion, wolfed it down, while my mother and I had breakfast. From there Brandi and I walked home and I fed Brandi her regular breakfast of dog food.

Within an hour of her breakfast, Brandi vomited. She vomited four times that morning. Everything came out and she didn’t eat for the rest of the day. When Sunday came and went and she still refused to eat, we knew something was wrong. She did drink, frequently actually, and even then on occasion she retched that up. Monday my wife got her to the vet, where they drew blood for test and prescribed an antibiotic. Tuesday and Wednesday passed and she still hadn’t eaten. Her drinking became more excessive and she needed to urinate every two hours. We didn’t need the blood test result to tell us there was something seriously wrong. But when the blood test came back with the liver function enzyme out of sight—it was 1500-something when normal is 100—we feared the worst. She was at near complete liver failure. The vet said we needed to do an ultrasound to assess her liver and pancreas. At this point we feared cancer. We looked up all the liver diseases. Pancreatitis came up as a possibility. Hepatitis. Bile duct obstructions. Ingesting toxins. A reaction to the rimadyl. Leptospirosis, a bacterial disease one picks up from the urine of animals.

On Thursday they performed the ultrasound which thank God ruled out cancer. They saw no growths or abnormal blockages. Of course they couldn’t be quite sure without a biopsy, but the vet didn’t want to go there yet. With time, she said, the liver can recover from most of those diseases. She drew more blood and prescribed two different antibiotics. But how long can she go without eating we asked? Don’t worry was the response. As long as she’s drinking she can go a long time.

Well she continued to excessively drink and urinate. She just lay around weak, depressed, enervated, and at times shivering from nausea. At one point during the week my wife started sleeping downstairs on the couch so it would be easy to take her out during the night. Even so Brandi left a puddle on the upstairs carpet almost every morning on which I discovered in the dark with my bare feet when I got up to go to work. Urrgh, so hey, I didn’t escape entirely.

Brandi still wouldn’t eat. And it was very hard to get her to take her medicine. Brandi is notorious for picking out pills from her food. Normally you can mix medicine with very enticing food such as wrapped in a piece of cheese or inside a ball of ice cream or a piece of meat and dogs will just swallow it in a gulp. But Brandi repulsed from food, so there was no way to entice. I tried with a piece of chicken but she just turned her nose at it. I pried her jaws open (she knew I was trying to get a pill in there) and tried to place it way back in her mouth but the little devil flicked it forward and out with her tongue. I tried to go with my hand all way back to her throat, and still she worked it up, her jaw, mouth, and tongue working in unison like a machine. The vet told us to us to get water down her throat with the pill and she’d have to swallow and to rub her nose which will make her want to lick it and so then swallow. Ok, but how do you get water down the throat of a dog with a pill? My wife came up with an idea. She took a syringe, one without a needle, and filled it with water. I then pried Brandi’s jaw open, stuck my hand as deep as I could go, placed the pill toward the back, and as my hand slipped out my wife squirted the syringe full of water into her mouth. And as Brandi still tried to work that pill out I clamped her mouth shut, lifted her head so that it pointed to the ceiling, and we both tickled her nose while she struggled. LOL, that’s probably the only funny moment in this whole ordeal.

By Saturday she still wasn’t eating, a full week, and so the vet thought it best to take her to a veterinary hospital where they can put her on IV fluids and where a specialist could see her. The one we went to was a good forty minute drive. We had gone there once before, many years ago, for our previous dog who had cancer at the time to get a final opinion. They had concluded with our vet that it was terminal. So going to this hospital didn’t carry fond associations. But we knew they were good. We got there late, went through the recent medical history, and went through the possibilities. Brandi had lost twelve pounds (about 5.5 kg) in that week; that’s like 13 percent of her weight. They were to perform tests, put her on IV, observe her, perform another ultrasound, and hold off a decision to mid week on a biopsy. The doctor gave us hope. She said that most liver damage if treated aggressively could be repaired.

So we left her and they called us twice a day with progress reports and kept us in the loop on the way forward. It was still a few days before she started eating and even then it was just a sampling. But she was getting nutrition on IV and her blood test results were heading in a positive direction. That liver function enzyme came down to 700-something and then later in the week to 300-something. My wife went to visit her one day and found her better, though still in crises mode. She still wasn’t eating and still urinating every two hours. But then by mid week her kidney function started to go in the wrong direction, and though it never reached a life and death situation it was well beyond normal with no idea of its trajectory. Whatever hit her liver had also socked her kidneys, and that could be even more problematic. Kidneys don’t repair themselves as a liver can.

By Thursday her kidney function (creatinine) did start to come down, and so we all felt it was an appropriate time to take her home. We picked her up on Friday, certainly gaunt and skeletal around the ribs but frisky as a fish and rearing to go home. She wanted out! But really they took good care of her. We reviewed her status with the doctor. She’s got a number of pills to take, has to go on special diet for her liver and kidneys, and should take it easy for a while. We talked over what might have caused this. It was not a natural event. She may have picked up some toxic while I had her out, possibly a wild mushroom, though it’s been dry lately. She could be that rare dog who reacts this way to rimadyl. Perhaps she picked something up from the feces or urine of some sick animal. Or perhaps there was a bad lot of her food that some toxic got in. The vet has asked us to bring in her last bag of dog food and they are going to contact the manufacturer. Brandi will have to come back for a blood test in a week, and after paying a small fortune we were on our way home with our beloved pooch. I must give a plug though. Kudos to Red Bank Veterinary Hospital in New Jersey. They were outstanding, especially the several vets that handled her case. When we stopped for gas and Brandi started barking at the people at the gas station, I knew she was a heck of lot better.

She’s been home now the weekend and appears to keep improving. It’s getting harder to get her to take her pills – she’s on to our tricks – but she really has an appetite. Unfortunately we can’t feed her too much, and the food she’s on to ease the stress on the liver and kidneys is low protein, which isn’t all that satisfying for a dog, and it’s really bland. She wants to eat but she’s now turning her nose to it. We are allowed to give her white rice with boiled chicken at five to one rice to chicken ratio. She eats that in a couple of gulps and leaves some of the rice. And her need to urinate has spread out to six hours now. This morning she finally wanted to go for a good walk. As long as there isn’t any lasting damage to her kidneys I think she’s going to be okay.

Here's a picture of her this weekend. We now call her Skinny Minnie. You can see her front legs shaved for the IV. Her belly was shaved too for the ultrasound.