It has been a while since I have updated Meg’s tripawds blog, I suppose it is a case of no news is good news.
Since Meg’s ampuversary we’ve moved houses to a place with a giant yard and no stairs, which is great for Meg. We’ve fostered a cheeky greyhound over the Christmas period which both Meg and Dotti have loved. And finally we got up to Meg’s annual check up.
I’ve been anxiously approaching the day. I spent the day feeling pretty sick about it actually, planning for something terrible. Its not as if Meg has any obvious health issues, a bit of coughing that seemed to be an annual occurrence throughout summer, but when a dog who has a collapsing trachea, a heart murmur and a cancer history has her check up, you know something won’t be right. So the vet went through each step of the check up – dental (needed), preventative heart worm tablets (needed), temperature okay, diet okay, squeezing of the organs to look for tumours okay, heart – issues.
Since we’ve had Meg (two years) she has had a grade 3-4 heart murmur, but now there is crackling in the lungs indicating theres fluid, and it is a definite grade 4. I swear our old vets always said there was a bit of crackling, and really we should’ve taken her back to her old vets (difficult to do out of work hours), but nevertheless, the new vets think she should start on diuretics and another heart drug. They said they now start them on drugs when they have a grade 3 murmur, so I suppose its much of a muchness. It wasn’t as if I wasn’t expecting that Meg would have to start on heart meds at this check up, but the reality of it happening has me a bit sad. I know she can live for years with medication and treating her is better than ignorance, but reminders of her inevitable trip to the rainbow bridge is never easy.
Anyhoo, she is going to start her diuretics in the next few days, and maybe the other, apparently expensive, heart medications if they don’t clear up the fluid quickly. So we probably need to invest in a lot of pee pads and a few more water bowls. I feel awful that Meg is going to have to go through peeing so much, the vet didn’t exactly sum it up in nice way, “she’ll be up every half hour during the night” etc but I guess it is for the greater good.
Anyway, I was feeling like I needed to explain all this to people who got it, and it hit me that was all of you on tripawds! I hope all your pups are doing well, and if you know of any supplements/natural extras that we can give Meglet to help her lil old heart I’d love to hear it.
Maybe we should invest in some dog diapers?
