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Hi --- am forwarding this from Rick, as he is not subbed to the Brier pups list under his e-mail address. We notified Gina about this via e-mail last night… but we thought it was worthwhile enough to share with the entire list. Just a word of precaution, PLEASE check your dogs regularly (feet, ears, mouths, all over!)
-Yanna
-----Original Message----- Subject: Michelob's vet visit.
Hi everyone!
Thanks from us to all of you who have had Michelob in your thoughts today. We are awaiting test results to see just what the heck is going on with him. We need you all to please keep him in your thoughts as it could be days or weeks before we figure out what is going on with him. Or maybe never. Right now he is home with us in guarded status. We have to be with him 24/7 as it is possible for him to crash at anytime necessitating a trip to emergency.
I am going to try and sum up what or vet told us today, what we are doing to treat him and the different possibilities of the causes. If your not interested please delete now!
FIRST OF ALL (YES I AM SHOUTING) CHECK YOUR DOGS MOUTHS REGULARLY! SECONDLY IF YOU EVER SEE ANY BLOOD ANYWHERE FIND OUT WHERE IT IS COMING FROM RIGHT NOW!
For those of you who may not know what happened I will give you a short synopsis. We found a couple of small smears of blood on the tile and carpet and after checking the dogs out could not find anything. I didn’t look at mouths though until a little later. When I did there was dried blood at the gum line on Michelob our 9 year old. Upon closer examination I found a red blood blister at the side of Michelob’s tongue. I cleaned his mouth and teeth and kept checking on him. I called and talked to our vet who got us in this morning. Since last night I also found some bruising in Michelob’s left ear. Mich has been acting normally and eating and doing all bodily functions as normal.
As soon as our vet saw Mich’s mouth and ear he told us that Mich has an auto-immune disorder. The bruising which is called (Petechiation ecchymotis) we were seeing in Mich’s ears were also on his gums and around his penis.
To put it simply something has told his body to attack itself and his normal clotting is not working. The blood in his mouth is from the blood blister on his tongue that will not clot or heal. The blood blister is probably from him accidentally biting himself.
The worst case scenario we were given was the dreaded cancer but our vet seemed to think that that would be a very remote chance. His feeling is that it could possibly be Tick Fever or Valley Fever. So those are the first things we are going to try and rule out. I doubt it is tick fever as the last tick we have ever seen was 6 years ago in another residence. But it is always a possibility. Valley fever is always a risk here in the Southwest. We are also running a full blood workup. We should have those results back this afternoon. To go with the blood workup we are also doing a Autoimmune Profile as well as a Coagulation profile. Those 2 tests will better let us know what is actually going on if it is not tick fever or valley fever.
Just to be on the safe side we started Mich on Doxycycline in case it truly is tick fever related. We also have a pretty high dosage of Prednisone on hand that we will start later today (if instructed) when we get the blood work back.
Mich has to be a couch potato for now as any trauma to the body right now could kill him. No swimming, nothing! We have been told to watch him very closely as dogs with this type of problem can crash very quickly. Our vet was fairly positive that we had caught this in time as Mich is showing no outward signs of having any problem. Our vet is also very sure that we will get to the bottom of the problem.
We should have a little better idea what is going on in a few hours. We won’t know about the tick fever or valley fever, however, for a few days.
Please keep you paws crossed for our big blonde Mich.
Rick and Yanna
Rick Reid, Yanna Jorni and The Golden Menagerie - Jake, Chelsea, Michelob and Austin
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