In retrospect, I realize that he was probably feeling sick as long as six months ago. He started having a lot of accidents in the house, but I thought he was just acting out because I went back to work in an office after being home for a while. Now I am mad at myself for being upset with him, since he was not trying in anyway to misbehave, but he had a lot wrong with him. I keep thinking of little things he was doing to alert me to his discomfort and I, in my 'intellectual superiority', thought he was just being naughty. He was whining late at night, not because he wanted me to do something for him, but because he was in terrible pain. I feel absolutely horrible about this now, and how irritated I was with him.
Tuesday, December 18th he was acting very lethargic and sleeping a lot... which I did not think was anything different, the truth of the matter is that Micks was quite a bit overweight and really spoiled... however, later on that night his whining reached new heights. I was up most the night with him, he could not get comfortable and kept crying and roaming around. He wanted to go outside and stay there, it was close to 15 degrees outside but he was shivering with a high fever and couldn't stand it. He was so thirsty but couldn't keep anything down. He hadn't eaten in two days, which is extremely unusual behavior for him. He was terribly weak and sickly and couldn't really walk around. Also his face was very drawn and his sad dog eyes told a story, as did his stationary tail.
So my husband said he could take him to the vet in the morning, if we just worked on getting through the night. Early the next morning he began with the bloody diarrhea and I totally lost my composure. I was horribly, horribly distraught and Steve took him to his appointment an hour early.
They took x-rays and put an IV in his little paw and worked on getting his fever down and rehydrating him since he hadn't kept even water down for a couple days. The x-rays showed a mass in his abdomen in the spleen/liver/pancreas area. This vet said that it was a tumor in his spleen, a simple splenectomy will fix him right up. However, they quoted us a $3500 price for this "simple" surgery.
I started calling around town to see if there was anywhere that could do it for less - and there were, quite a few, but my sister-in-law Kristy, who is a vet tech in Wyoming, said that the operation should only cost about $500-$800. She was ready to do it if I could get him up to her - except that the surgeon at her hospital had already gone on Christmas vacation. Then we had the idea that smaller towns should be able to do it for cheap... and I called Ark Valley Animal Hospital in La Junta, Colorado, where I have a lot of friends and family and could at least have a place to stay. I took Mickey home from the Denver hospital and spent another difficult night of him in pain.
The three hour drive to LJ was heart-wrenching to say the least. He was so thirsty but I could only give him a dribble of water at a time because he could not keep it down. He sat in the passenger side and looked at me sadly with his big brown eyes. He was in so much pain, my poor little puppy. He could only doze off for a couple minutes at a time until he whimpered with pain, and I was completely exhausted myself since I had only been sleeping as much as him.
We arrived in LJ about 2pm on Friday and I took him directly to the hospital. They saw him immediately and I turned in his paperwork and x-rays (that I had on disc), thinking that we would be scheduling his surgery for 10:30am on Saturday.
Dr. Taullie immediately noticed that the other hospital did not follow up on his glucose levels, that were completely off the charts. She said, "well, he's in ketoacidosis," which is essentially the acutely horrific back-side of diabetes type 1. From Wikipedia:
In diabetic patients, ketoacidosis is usually accompanied by insulin deficiency, hyperglycemia, and dehydration. Since insulin is required to absorb glucose from the blood, its deficiency results in an energy crisis, fatty acid metabolism, and production of ketone bodies. Hyperglycemia results in glucose overloading the nephron and spilling into the urine. Dehydration results following the osmotic movement of water into urine, exacerbating the acidosis.
No, we didn't know he was diabetic. Poor, poor, puppy was SO sick.
She worked on rehydrating him and getting him stable to perform surgery and administered insulin. She took him home with her for the night, as the hospital isn't a 24 hour facility. I was feeling rather optimistic at this point.
She called me in the morning and said that his insulin levels are normal now but he still had a sleepness night, and is obviously in pain in the abdomen. She still wanted to operate on him, but in an exploratory manner instead of a simple splenectomy.
"Okay," Says I.
I hurried down to the hospital and sat with him on my lap while they did a little more blood work and prepped him for surgery. I am so glad I got that chance to just hold him and talk to him and breathe in his little doggie smell.
I hung out at the hospital for about an hour before she came out and told me what she had found. His largest problem was a growth in his pancreas, but he also had a lot of things wrong with his intestines, most notably that they had gotten twisted and the lower large intestine was purple and inflamed (hence the bloody diarrhea) and they showed numerous lesions, which are usually evidence of past trauma. Now we had gotten Micks from the pound; when they found him he was roaming free, so we know nothing about his life before that. Poor little guy was likely getting beat up - which is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG since he had the most easy-going personality on Earth.
Incidentally, there was nothing wrong with his spleen.
He was still on the table at this point and she asked if I would like her to try to get a slide out of the growth in the pancreas to take a cursory look and see if the cells appear cancerous. "Of course," I say. I know it wouldn't be the same as having a pathologist look at it, but I know she's gotta know the difference between healthy and cancerous cells.
About an hour later she comes back in and says that the cells don't appear to be cancerous. Which gave me a burst of hope for one split second. Then she went on to say that the growth is taking up so much of his pancreas, that to cut it out would leave a very weak and dysfunctional organ, and wouldn't be the best idea since he's already diabetic; the pancreas is working so poorly already. She said some other things but her message was clear: she could patch him up now but he will always be sick. Terribly, terribly sick. I asked a few questions about what would be involved in taking care of a diabetic dog with a sick pancreas and digestive troubles. Essentially I learned that it would take away everything that Mickey enjoys about life.
I made the horrible, horrible decision to euthanize him.
I drove back to Denver in a tear-stained haze; in fact, I don't really remember it much, and that that I do remember seems to be under water... When I got back home I took several sleeping pills and slept for 36 hours.
