As promised, here is a post on the latest and greatest with Chief's health updates. It was so wonderful to celebrate baby Lucy's first Christmas but the holiday was also quite stressful because our dog Chief was suffering with some major health concerns. In early December, Chief started to avoid his food and was just not being himself. We attributed it to Dan being out of town. Chief loves his Dad and is sometimes a little weird when Dan is away. :) When we traveled to South Dakota for the holidays, Chief's condition worsened - he was shivering, he was completely lethargic during Christmas celebrations, and he vomited each time that he attempted to eat food. I took him to a local vet in SoDak for a checkup the week of Christmas. He had lost almost 10 pounds but was still pretty active. The vet prescribed him Cerenia - an anti-nausea medication - and, when his temperature/physical exam came back normal, she decided not to do any blood work at the time. Cerenia did the trick for a while! Chiefy was his normal self, eating like a champ, playing with Scout, wanting to be outside, etc. However, by Christmas weekend, his condition was deteriorating. He was no longer eating and drinking, he was drooling quite a bit from the nausea, and was very lethargic. It is incredibly difficult to see your normally energetic, young, and active dog experience such a rapid decline in health. :(
We traveled to Fargo to spend time with the Storm family and we took Chief to their vet right away. He was a very sick dog at that point; very dehydrated, his blood pressure was so low that the vet needed to draw blood from his jugular since they couldn't get any blood from his leg. His body temperature was very low and he was severely depressed, The vet did blood work and diagnosed Chief with Lyme's disease, another tick borne infection, and with kidney damage. He was prescribed antibiotics, steroids, anti-nausea meds, and a special kidney diet and sent home. We were glad that Chief had a diagnosis! Later that night he was shivering and unable to keep anything down. Daniel took him to the emergency vet in the middle of the night where they started him on an IV for hydration. The vet said that Chief's bloodwork was very alarming and that it looked like he was heading toward kidney failure. The vet was very pessimistic about Chief's prognosis. We were devastated that our beloved, 4 1/2 year old pup was in such poor health so quickly. The thought of not returning to Wisconsin with our beautiful dog was very difficult. We continued to keep Chief on IV fluids all day, and we nursed him at home hooking him up to IV fluids at night. (Dan thinks that he may have found a second career path as a vet tech :) ) After the fluids, Chief was showing great signs of improvement. He was eating his kidney diet, he had a lot more energy, and he was eating snow when he was outside. We were thrilled with the progress and we had more blood work done to confirm that his BUN and Creatnine numbers were improving. We were convinced that he was not going into complete kidney failure.
The roller coaster continued when Chief had a very bad day on Sunday. He started vomiting again. He was restless and constantly licking his lips. He was dry heaving and started to throw up neon green bile. It was horrible. We had been hopeful that we could take our boy home to Madison to get another opinion from our regular vet since his prognosis from one vet was terrible and another vet said he would be fine. After he had such a miserable night, we decided that we couldn't travel home with Chief in that condition. We decided that with Chief's suffering and with the seeming amount of kidney damage - it was not fair to him to continue. (The last signs of renal failure are nausea, vomiting, etc) It was incredibly difficult but we said our goodbyes to our beloved dog. He is such a wonderful dog and he has been with us through the best years of our lives as we got married and started a family. We had always planned that he and Lucy would grow up together but it seemed like that was not to be. With heavy hearts we took him back to the emergency vet last night thinking that we would need to put him down.
When we got to the emergency vet, we weighed Chief and noted that he had lost 20 pounds in the past 3 weeks. He looked like such a sick dog. The vet said that she wanted to run another blood panel to see Chiefy's BUN and Creatnine levels. When the results came back - we were astounded. Chief's values were getting better - even though he was so sick and dehydrated. The vet confirmed that our dog was not in kidney failure!!! She said that his Sodium and Potassium levels/ratios seemed off which could be a sign of Addison's disease - an adrenal insufficiency. We were in disbelief as this test came back positive. We truly thought that we were going to lose our pup to kidney failure. It was a Christmas miracle. After receiving fluids for several hours, Chief was stable enough to travel home to Wisconsin with us. We are in the process learning more about Addison's disease for dogs - here is a good website if you want to learn about it too: http://www.addisondogs.com/
Basically, Chief's adrenal glands are not producing appropriate hormones and as a result, his body went into an Addisonian crisis with symptoms of lethargy, vomiting, anorexia, etc. Yikes. Addison's disease is not common and its symptoms are pretty vague and, as a result, it can be misdiagnosed as other issues - most notably kidney failure. Humans can have Addison's disease too. The most famous person to have it was John F Kennedy.
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]Dan and I looked at wikipedia to find other people who had the disease and it includes Jane Austen, Charles Dickins, and Osama Bin Laden. Now we can add Chief Storm, notable Large Munsterlander to the list. :)
Chief will need to be on medication for the rest of his life but he *should * be able to have a normal dog life and we are so grateful!! We will keep you posted on his health as we meet with his vet in the coming days and weeks.
This experience really made us realize how thankful we need to be for our beloved pets! You just can't take time with them for granted. Give thanks for the healthy pets in your life and give them an extra hug or pet tonight. They bring us such joy. Thank you to our families for their support, prayers, and good thoughts during this health scare. A special and heartfelt thank you to Ken and Nola for wrapping Chief in warm blankets, for helping to clean up dog puke, for waking up at all hours of the night to watch Lucy while we visited the emergency vet, and for the hugs and support when we thought we were going to lose our dog. We are so appreciative. Chief is lucky to be your granddog.
