August 23, 2009

• My dog is sick. And it's kinda my fault.

  How awful is that? Now I'm not one of those people who say my dog is my child, but he is as close as I'm likely to have any time soon. As guilty as I feel about my dog being ill, I can't imagine the levels of guilt parents can end up with.

  My Cheyenne isn't a young dog, and he's been getting arthritis for a few years now. He's gotten to the point that vitamins aren't enough to help his joints, so at his last check-up, I got a script for a pain medication for him. Well, he hasn't been eating for a few days, and he got to the point he wasn't moving by Saturday. Turns out he's gotten massively anemic - to the point that the vet starts talking about a blood transfusion. I'm thinking that this is from some damage from his fall a couple of weeks ago that I didn't bother having him X-rayed after. Cue massive guilt. We start with getting his chest X-rayed to see if it will show where's he's losing blood from.

  The X-rays came out clear for the most part. No big tumors causing a bleed, no blood pooled in his chest cavity. Current best guess is that the arthritis pain meds have caused lesions and/or ulcers in his intestines, which is apparently a possible side effect they have. So he may have fallen because he was weak from anemia. And if he hadn't fallen, I might have paid more attention to the fact that he was being kinda lethargic, but I chalked it up to pain from his leg. Sadly, I hadn't been giving him the pain pill every day before he fell, because he seemed to be moving around well enough before. But once he got hurt, I was religious about giving him a pill every day.

  Now he's off those pain pills (he's got another one from the leg injury that I'm still giving him), and getting a medication that should help heal any lesions in his intestines. Plus he got some liquid vitamins to hopefully help bring his red blood cell count back up. I just hope I didn't wait too long to get him to the vet, and that this is, in fact, the way he needs to be treated. I think he's got a bit more color in his tongue today, but his gums are still really gray.

  It's possible that it's not the intestines causing his trouble. The X-rays did show a lot of "nodules" in his chest cavity around his heart. They could be benign, or they could be cancer. None of them were very large, and none seemed to be in a particularly life-threatening spot, but they're still a concern, at least for me. It would take more (expensive) testing and such to see if they are cancer, and I'm not sure I'm willing to do that. Even if it is cancer, I'm not going to put my poor dog through treatment - he's almost 14 years old, those nodules are awfully plentiful, and I'm willing to put him through a lot of probably painful procedures that will confuse him. I just want him to be happy and comfortable for however long I'll get to have him. Of course, I want him around as long as possible, but I'm not going to put him through a lot of crap to try and cheat what nature intends.

  But I still feel awful about the anemia. Though it would have been nice to have been warned about it as a possible side-effect of his arthritis medication... I'm almost positive they didn't mention it when they gave it to me. Okay, I could have looked it up, but it never even occurred to me to do so. But you can bet I looked up the new stuff they gave him.

  • 8:12 pm
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