I was awake at 6:30 this morning worrying about Oreo. He had a really rough night and hardly got any sleep. I was up with him every few hours just watching over him. There is so little that we are able to do. It is really frustrating.
At 7:00 Oreo got up again and stood at the edge of the bed looking out at the room. He does this periodically so we really don’t think anything of it anymore. Then he hopped off of the bed. He does this often, when he isn’t sick, so that he can get a drink. I listened for him to be lapping water which I was hoping for because I felt that he was not getting enough fluids. The sound that I heard was not Oreo drinking, however. Apparently he is having bladder control issues as well. He paniced and ran all over the bedroom while he was peeing. It was a total mess. So disgusting. I couldn’t get out of the bed without stepping into it. Every inch of the floor had been hit, it seemed like. He was really scared that we were going to be mad. I can’t believe how much pee could come out of such a little dog. I took him outside then and he peed out there as well. I guess, at least, he can’t be all that dehydrated!
So I ended up spending a bit of the early morning cleaning the floor while Dominica and Oreo went back to sleep. It was very encouraging to see that Oreo felt more comfortable and was able to sleep again. After I got the floor cleaned up (thanks to dad’s portable steam cleaner thing) I went back to bed but not to sleep. Oreo was actually snuggly for a change and that made me feel a lot better. He got some much needed rest even if I did not.
I called the veterinary hospital at 8:30 and managed to get Oreo squeezed into an appointment at 11:15. They are going to run blood word at our request so they want to get him in early so that they can get the results back from the lab yet today. Dominica is back on her regular schedule today. So she was up at 9:00. Oreo stayed in bed. Thank goodness he was feeling well enough to stay in bed.
I was supposed to be helping out over at Union Presbyterian at 11:00 this morning but I had to call and reschedule for noon. I had a really short morning before leaving at 11:00 to take Oreo over to the animal hospital around the corner from us. I got him over there and he was able to get right in to see the doctor. He has two doctors that he usual sees. One is the doctor from Geneseo and the other is the swing doctor that goes back and forth between Geneseo and Avon. Oreo goes to either place as needed. Today we were in Geneseo with the “swing” doctor that he sees about one third of the time. We talked for a little while and he got some ideas about what might be wrong. We made it in time to be able to get his blood work sent out today so we hope to know something this evening. Oreo has to spend the day at the hospital so that they can get all of the samples that they need along with the X-Rays. We really have no idea what is wrong at this point and need to establish as much information about Oreo as possible.
I ran home real quickly so that I could update Dominica on Oreo’s progress and status. Then I went down to Leicester and managed to get to the church right at noon. It turned out that they really just needed a computer set up for them. And by “set up” I mean it was previously installed with all of the software. It was just “as shipped” and needed to be plugged in and fired up. Only took ten minutes. So that was much easier than I had anticipated.
I hadn’t had any breakfast and I have not had nearly as many Cook’s subs recently as I have wanted so I drove down the road to Greggsville and got me a toasted cheese sub at Cook’s. Yummy! Boy those are good. That is two in a row.
I spent the afternoon being totally useless eagerly anticipating some information from the vet. I was supposed to call at 3:00 so I had to wait until then. When I called they said that they had been really busy today and that they had not yet had a chance to get his X-Ray taken care of. So I had to wait until 5:00 to call back.
I called back at 5:00 and they said that Oreo was ready to come home. They said that they wanted to send out for some additional blood word down at Cornell. I agreed and they took the blood quickly before I got down there. It was almost 5:30 before I got down to pick Oreo up. Boy was I glad to get him back. I don’t like having him stay someplace else. It worries me that he might react badly and be sad thinking back to being left with the SPCA in Houston. The plan had been that I was going to pick him up and then return at 6:45 to talk to the doctor but I managed to arrive just in time to talk to the doctor without having to return later. That worked out really well.
The doctor walked me through Oreo’s blood work. The results? He has extremely high blood fat content and high cholesterol. His blood fat content is so incredibly high that the doctor described the results as “his blood ‘sludging’ as his heart tries to pump it.” So when the blood stops flowing through something like his back leg that area runs out of oxygen. Then when the blood moves again he will get that painful tingling sensation you get when your foot falls asleep only this is more accute and without any warning. He thinks that that will explain Oreo’s bizarre reactions and sudden changes.
So why is his blood like this? We won’t know better until the blood work returns from Cornell’s labs in over a week. But the first guess is a hypothyroidal condition. That is most likely in older dogs. A simple hyperlibidemia disease might be the case which is, unfortunately, harder to treat. Or their might be a liver failure issue. However the tests indicated that all of the liver functions were most likely doing fine so the doctor thinks that that is particularly unlikely. Thank goodness. With all of his steroids over the years we are always worrying about his liver. Poor little boy.
He had a pretty good evening. He only had one major “fit” all night and is behaving a lot more like our Oreo for the first time in a week. That is making us feel a lot better. We are guessing that all of his excercise yesterday and his fasting today for his blood word might have helped just enough to bring him back over that line. He is now on a prescription low fat diet. That is all that we can do until we get the result from Cornell. But it might be enough. At least to keep him acting like Oreo. He will likely need some sort of drugs to get him actually healthy though. His blood fat content is just so high.
I am driving Dominica into work tomorrow. We are supposed to be getting wind gusts close to 70 mph (that’s around 100 kph) and it is going to be awfully dangerous out there.