What's been ailing your poor puppy? Having a family member down sick, one that looks to you to make it better can be wearing. We had to put down a 17 year old cat (an adoptee that my girlfriend knew had Feline AIDs when she got him) that had fallen madly in love with me when I joined the household and became "my cat" a year ago this month. In the short time that I knew Franky he wormed his way into my heart. It was painful to see him go from a 20 pound muscular cat to under 8 pounds as the FIV finally started to take him.
Our visiting vet did the deed on our dining room table as we both held on to him to let him know he was loved.
I hope your pup is feeling better now.
Thank you so much for your concern. I am so sorry about your cat! All of our kids are grown and we have grandchildren, but Princess Pocahontas has become very close to us. (She was named by the grandkids because her face resembles the Disney character.) We have had several other dogs over the years but she is the one who had been by far the most affectionate. She actually turned 6 just a couple of weeks ago. It is kind of a long story at this point, but I will try to keep it as short as I can.
Princess started acting very lethargic. When looking her over we noticed lumps under her lowest mammary glands and they got bigger over night and she felt warm to us. We assumed that it was some type of infection, but when we took her to the veterinarian hospital we have been going to for 30 years we were told by the vet that it was most likely cancer. She took biopsies and examined the samples under a microscope. The vet advised us to come back the next day for surgery in case it was an aggressive form of cancer. When I questioned her about what she had seen with the microscope she admitted she hadn’t seen anything conclusive. I wasn’t sure that her diagnosis was accurate and wanted the samples she had taken sent to a lab which the vet insisted would only add more expense and not change her recommended treatment.
We took her to another vet the next morning for a second opinion. She did a much more thorough exam than the first vet including X-rays. The second vet was a younger lady from Korea and she seemed much more intuitive. The second vet felt as we did that she had some type of infection which could be from cancer but she didn’t think it was a good idea to do surgery before giving antibiotics a chance to clear that up. So Princess started taking antibiotics and an anti-inflammatory, actually a steroid.
The following morning one of the glands in her neck swelled up to the size of a tennis ball. So we ended up taking her back in for more tests. We continued her medication. We were very relieved when her four separate fine needle aspiration biopsies from two different vets all came back negative for cancer. She still was obviously not feeling well and more large lumps formed in her glands. The vets warned us that this could still be a terminal problem.
By the time she finished her ten days of medication the lumps had mostly dissipated, and she wasn’t acting as lethargic. It was decided that the she was healthy enough at that time for surgery. Tumors were found in both ovaries, but thankfully they were benign. The glands in her neck did swell some again after her surgery.
It seems to have been mostly an endocrine problem that was possibly being aggravated by a hormone imbalance caused by the tumors in her ovaries. It has been several days since her surgery and we have now started cutting back on her pain meds and we are hopeful that she will make a full recovery. We are glad that we went for a second opinion because it seems like surgery before her infection was cleared up would have been harder and more risky for her.
Thank you so much for asking and sorry for the long explanation.