Veterinary Review, April 16, 2021

Hiya everyone.

The Veterinary Review for this week has a bit more punch than last week’s report.

I miss reporting on little Arya most of the time because she is in foster care and we are not the ones taking her to the vet. She did go in on Monday, April 5th for continued circling behavior. This has been going on for awhile and has been treated in many ways. It has improved, but not resolved. They have settled on behavior or possibly a neurological deficiency as a diagnosis.

Friday things got a little wild. We had an appointment for Doc to see three cats. Aries, Poppy, and Allura. Aries was just there for some quick bloodwork to rule out a particular disease that would keep his urine bloody. It was negative.

Poppy was there because she has lost a noticeable amount of weight. Doc looked her over and didn’t find anything on his exam except the weight loss. So they drew blood and sent a full panel off to the lab to see what came back.

We got her results back and they show that Poppy has chronic pancreatitis. We will be treating her for it off and on for the rest of her life.

Poppy

Allura is our beautiful pure white, deaf girl. She was there because her head was tilted to the side. That is often caused by ear infections, which is what I thought since I waited from Wednesday until Friday to bring her in so we could get our regular doctor. Well, her ears led Doc to the same conclusion. He sent us home with ear drops and instructions to start antibiotics (which I already had). We are well behaved and followed instructions as written.

When we woke up the next morning, Allura was lying in between us with her head basically glued to her ribcage. If you messed with her too much she would just start twisting and rolling. This was completely new to me. I had no clue what was going on. I decided to watch her for just a little while after we gave her her meds and see if maybe the ear medication would help.

Allura

After about 3 hours I decided enough was enough, so off to the Emergency Clinic we went. I won’t talk about the hours sitting in the truck waiting on someone to call me and tell me what’s up. Finally the doctor called and said it was a rough case of vestibular disease, which can often be caused by a reaction to ear medication. I felt awful for giving her a dose that morning, but how were we to know? The doctor said we were going to make some drug changes, including giving her an anti-nausea medication. She warned us that episodes like this can take weeks to fully resolve.

As of today, Allura is much better. She is up and walking around, though she still has a pretty severe head tilt. We also got an anti-dizziness drug from our regular vet that really seems to help her a lot. We had her confined to a small cage so she wouldn’t hurt herself, but as of today she is free again. She is walking up and down the ramp to the bed and cruising around the room with seeming ease.

Tuesday was our regular acupuncture. We have figured out that we can leave Ferrell in his carrier while we do Jason’s acupuncture. He grumps a bit, but I will take that over having my arm shredded because Jason got angry at Ferrell. After Jason is done, we let Ferrell roam the room for a few minutes so he can get the lay of the land and see what has changed since last week. After he roams a bit, he is much easier to handle during his acupuncture also. Success!

A bit of wild and a bit of calm. No deadly diagnosis though, and I will celebrate that.

Until next time!