Ratablog

Tonight, the dog preempts the rats

The real Abita is our aging beagle. We aren't sure how old she is; I adopted her in 1994 from a local shelter. She'd been picked up as a stray with a litter of puppies, so she was probably at least a year old, maybe as old as 7. (I'm inclined to think she was on the younger side of the original estimates.)

We don't know her background, or much of it. She comes from an area that was fairly rural, and she may have been a hunting dog...she did tree a racoon once. Then there was a time when my then-husband took the belt off of a pair of pants by pulling on the buckle...Abita saw the belt and she dove cowering under the bed, leading us to suspect she was abused.

In spite of whatever happened to her before I got her, she is the sweetest dog you could ever meet. Not the brightest, maybe, nor the best-behaved, but definitely the sweetest.

She's also a bit of a medical marvel. A few years ago the vet picked up a heart murmur and sent her to a cardiologist. Turns out she has a mitral valve prolapse. She went on heart medication, and after two years, the murmur was practically undetectable. She went off the drug. The murmur stayed gone. The cardiologist says he's never seen anything like it.

A couple years ago she went in to have a cyst removed. In the routine pre-op bloodwork they saw that her platelets were low, a condition called thrombocytopenia. After running a bunch of tests, all the vets could conclude was that she had it, but not why. They put her on prednisone and monitored her blood for several months, the platelets came back.

The next year we saw a new associate vet for her checkup. When I mentioned the thrombocytopenia, he flipped back through her chart (it's pretty thick). Then he said "Holy s*it!" He clapped his hand over his mouth, said "Excuse me, I'm sorry. But do you realize how low her platelet count was? You're lucky she didn't bleed to death!"

Last summer we saw another new associate vet. When I mentioned the thrombocytopenia, he went back through the chart, and when he got to the lab tests he said "Holy crap! This dog is lucky to be alive!"

Another year in there we found out that she had Lyme disease, but that seems like nothing comapred the the mysteriously repairing heart murmur and her survival with no platelets. The vet has said "Whatever you're doing, keep it up." I've wondered if she's part cat, and has nine lives.

I hope she has nine lives.

Last night...actually early this morning...she started throwing up. Vomiting isn't that unusual for a dog, and I had given her a new type of canned food for dinner. But she kept throwing up for several hours, and that's not typical even for a dog with a sensitive stomach. I took her to the vet as soon as they opened.

They put her on IV fluids and started running tests while I went to work. The vet called after lunch to tell me that her liver enzymes were elevated. When I got there after work, they'd done x-rays and seen some "areas of concern"...the vet was going to take the films to a radiologist tonight.

I got to bring Abita home tonight, but she goes back tomorrow to be hooked back up to the IV. She did pass a stool a bit ago that looked like it had some wood in it; I'm praying that the stupid dog just ate a rat chew stick and now that she's unblocked she'll be fine. In the meantime, I need to keep her with me to stop her from chewing on her IV port (she'll be wearing the dreaded e-collar tonight).

I joked to one of the vet techs earlier today that Abita's jealous of all the medical attention that the rats get, so I figure I'll give her a blog post too.

Posted by Abita at March 29, 2006 08:48 PM