Daisy update (warning, some gross medical stuff.)
I know a number of you have been following Daisy’s progress, both on here and on Danielle’s blog.
A quick summary on what’s happened so far: we took her to our vet a few weeks ago complaining of frequent urination, excessive drinking, weight loss, and sludge in her urine. We went back and forth for a while on a number of diagnosis, including kidney disease and bladder cancers, with a number of tests reaching no clear conclusions. This diagnostic process culminated in a cytoscopy (a camera in the bladder) last Wednesday.
This revealed that the sludge, which consisted of infected pus, came from her vagina rather than her urethra. This led to an exploratory laparotomy while she was under anaesthetic and found some infected tissue left behind from when she was spayed as a pup – part of the uterus and part of one ovary.
Several biopsy samples were taken. If the remaining tissue is shown to be infected, the likely diagnosis is stump pyometra. This would explain most or all of her symptoms. We’re cautious about this conclusion because the vet who did the surgery didn’t think the infection looked bad enough to have caused her such serious symptoms, but it’s possible it looked better than he expected because the pus was being flushed out of her vagina, reducing the abcess in the infected tissue.
Meanwhile, after her op, she was very ill. Listless anyway, she was worse because of an implanted pain-control drug (a four-day dose in a tiny pellet implanted under the skin) and refusing to eat or drink. On top of her weight loss over the last few months, this meant she dropped to 13.3 kg – from a healthy weight of around 19 kg. You can see how painfully skinny she is in the picture above.
This led to yet another trip to our vets for her to spend the day on IV fluids and perhaps be fed via a stomach tube. They syringe-fed her a small amount of food but she vomited several times. During this process, however, we’ve been growing dissatisfied with our regular vet (Sanders in Cwmbran) on a number of counts, chief amongst them that they have an overnight service – sick animals are transferred to and from an out-of-hours practice in Cardiff, VETS. This is costly and can’t be great for the animal, both from the stresses of travel and broken continuity of care. On top of that. we received quite poor service from VETS on a previous visit, and we caught Sanders moments away from making a serious drug error on Friday1.
So we ended up taking her to a new vets, Summerhill in Newport, which does run a true 24/7 operation. She was there overnight from Friday evening until Saturday morning, receiving excellent care from their most senior vet, Jean Morris. This morning, she started to drink water under her own volition, and would willingly eat chicken. We went to see her and she greeted us with a tail wag and even a little jumping around, which is the happiest she’s looked for several weeks. We brought her home this afternoon as Jean felt we could continue to care for her as well as they could.
We’re not out of the woods yet. Hopefully, the biopsy results will come back early next week and will prove that this was nothing more than stump pyometra. If so, we can get on with healing her up and putting some weight back on her. If the results are inconclusive, or show something else like cancer, then we could still face an uncertain future.
We’re just happy to have her home and comfortable. I honestly thought, when we were taking her to Summerhill yesterday, that she’d never be coming home again.
My wife was on the phone and the vet mentioned that he was concerned about Daisy’s general flatness. He said, almost in passing, that he was going to put a fentanyl patch on her for pain relief. Danielle had to stop him immediately and point out that his notes from the specialist clearly indicated she had this under-the-skin fentanyl dose already, so putting on the patch would have double dosed her. We heard him call out to the tech “wait, don’t put that patch on.” I’m not sure what the overdose would have done had we not caught it but I was unimpressed, to say the least. ↩︎
