Author: Katie

Surgery done

After putting off booking in for Meg’s lump removal and dental, and then pushing it back so we could get a dental month discount, yesterday Meg finally went under the knife.

I forgot how stressful Meg staying at the vet is, and by 12:30 I was relived to see my vets number pop up on my phone and even more relieved to hear everything went well. The surgery went well and Meg only needed one of her front teeth out.

This clinic must have used different pre anaesthetic sedatives or something because Meg was very spaced out last night. Luckily she was still with it enough to have her dinner and even a chicken nugget from McDonalds, but there was lot of wobbly walks, a bit of whimpering and shaking, and a lot of glazed over looks.

The wound is looking better today, but poor lil Meg is still tired and not impressed with annoying stitches. We have her in a shirt to stop her scratching, funnily enough she wouldn’t keep the little dog sock on her back leg.

Fingers crossed her recovery goes smoothly and we get good news back about the lump – the entire process is reminding me of the amputation recovery, but I’m even more worried she’s going to rip the wound right open.

Hopefully that was the last time Meg needs to go into surgery for a while!!

Inconclusive results

I worked from home on Wednesday waiting for Meg’s aspiration results to come back. At 4:30pm I decided that the results must have got delayed and turned my phone back onto silent, only to miss a call from the vets at 4:34pm. Called back and was told the vet would call me back when she had the chance.

Still feeling nervous, I headed off to a function an hour later, telling my partner (Tim) to get in touch with the vet clinic and have them call him instead. Another hour or so later I check my phone to see a message from Tim saying “let me know when you can chat” (about Meg’s results). That was a heart sinking moment. You don’t have to chat about benign tumours… after a few messages with Tim and reading the pathology report we got emailed the results were in. Inconclusive whether the tumour is malignant or benign, it mostly looks benign but there is a few rare, small, areas of cells that could be malignant.

The path report said to take a biopsy, and I guess the vet figures when a tumour is only 1cm or so big, just take the entire thing out. So surgery is needed again for poor Meggypeggyposis. I’m a little relieved that the results seem kind of positive, or at least not entirely negative. I mean, if it is a malignant cancer, at least we won’t find out until the tumour is already gone, and by the time we find out Meg will be cancer free again hopefully.

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Comfort frens

A post shared by Meg & Dotti 🐶 (@meg_and_dotti) on

 

Fingers crossed for our budget, and more importantly fingers crossed for Meg!

 

“Have you noticed this lump on her mammary gland?” Here we go again?

So yesterday Meg went in for another heart check up and to have x-rays on her heart and chest to see if she needs to start medications for her heart murmur, at a different vet than the pushy one who made us feel super uneasy about Meg’s future.

While she was only in for x-rays and wouldn’t even be going under anaesthesia or anything I was still nervous waiting for the call that she was fine after the “”procedure”” (as the vet clinic called it).

After an unproductive morning of worrying I finally got the call from the vet.

The heart is enlarged (it has always been enlarged since we adopted Meg in 2015 so no shock) and she should start on medications to prevent heart disease. As we expected. Phew I thought, and expected the call to end around that point after confirming when we would be in to pick up Meg. But the call kept going

The blood check showed liver enzymes are a little high, well, one specific one that can go up and down and it needs to be checked in three months. My heart skipped a little, what does that mean? Is she sick? Is her liver not working properly? Is it cancer?

And then it got worse. “Have you noticed this lump on her mammary gland?” the vet said. We had indeed noticed the lump, it had been there ever since we had Meg and slowly got bigger, but any other vet we had seen had said its probably nothing or not mentioned it at all, one had even said they thought it was loose bone cartilage. This vet though, perhaps a better vet, had aspirated it and wanted to know if we were happy for it to be sent off to the lab. So my heart sunk and the rest of the phone call was a bit blurry, as I quickly began to google “high liver enzymes dog” and “mammary tumour dog”.

When we picked up Meg the vet explained that mammary tumours are very common in dogs that weren’t desexed as puppies (thanks, Meg’s old owners), and there is a 50% chance it is benign and 50% chance it isn’t. If we lose that coin toss, it is another 50% chance it is a type that generally doesn’t spread, and 50% chance it is a type that spreads. From my googling, I think things are in our favour, the lump is small and the fact she has had it for years, it is slow growing, and not shown symptoms probably indicates it isn’t an aggressive, cruel cancer? I’ll be glad to know though, and once again feel silly for trusting vets words to not worry about something. I was feeling pretty relaxed about it, even if it is cancer, hopefully it will just be a simple surgery to remove a lump, but this morning I saw a missed call from the vet clinic and nearly threw up expecting it to be the pathology results, so perhaps I’m not as calm as I thought. It was simply the receptionist wanting to know if Meg was okay after being at the vets all day yesterday, which is a nice touch, but one that has sent nerves through me all over again. The other possibility is it is a mast cell tumour, but again, given how long it has been there for fingers crossed that means it is just sitting there, not spreading?

As for the heart news, I’m feeling glad that I stuck with my gut about the other vet we saw who wanted to start her on diuretics and other medications for actual heart disease, without checking if Meg actually  had heart disease yet. The vet we saw yesterday was adamant they wouldn’t of really helped the situation, and given the side effects of diuretics I’m glad Meg won’t need them for a while hopefully. So I suppose the lesson here is trust your instincts and second guess your vet about everything.

Fingers crossed for good news about the lump – the results should be back tomorrow *gulp*.

Love to all your tripawds!

PS I finally added some photos from our holiday on my blog about it – beach meg 

A meggymoo update

PHOTO UPDATE

 

Meg enjoying the sand and sun

This is the life!
When you’re deep in concussion and don’t know what you’re doing

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Every few weeks my boyfriend says “you haven’t updated Meg’s blog in ages” and I saw “I just don’t have the time or the news to write about?”.

Well, that still is the case, but I thought I better through up a new quick post, given my last post was about a health issue, and sudden silence after a health post seems a little ominous.

However, everything in Megs little world is peachy!

I will share a not-so-peachy story though, a month or two ago we trecked 8 hours along freeways to the New South Wales coast for a beach holiday. 8 hours of driving (plus stops) was a long day and we were all excited to get to the holiday house. We arrived, got upstairs and started unpacking the car, the dogs were loving this new found place. I went to the bathroom and heard a slight thunk and then my boyfriend (Tim) yelling. I raced out asking what happened to hear Meg fell off from the top of the stairs.

You see, the stairs went up one floor, had a resting point, and then up to the second level (so, two sets of stairs). There was a huge gap between the railing and the floor, and Meg must have not realised where she stepped out wasn’t the right set of stairs? Or tripped/slipped?

Anyway we raced down the stairs to Meg, who was on her side at the bottom, she let out a big groan and we saw she had blood coming from her eye and her mouth. I thought that was it – some sort of brain injury, we were going to lose our dog 5 minutes into our holiday. I raced up stairs to get Dotti so we could race Meg to the vet, when the people who lived in the downstairs half of the house came out to ask what all the screaming was about. After screaming that she fell off the stairs and we had to get to the vets, the kind woman explained she was actually a vet. Talk about lucky. Our luck continued as she checked Meg over, explaining that she had just put a tooth through her lip and cut her eyelid. Somehow she only had a concussion, and the vet had pain relief in her house. Due to the shock of it all, I cried for hours after and didn’t quite stop thinking Meg would drop dead from a brain bleed or an internal injury for a good 24 hours afterwards. But all was well, and Meg (and Dotti) enjoyed their holiday!

I’d post some photos but I am all outta space, but I just thought I’d let the tripawd world know all is well, and if your tripawd can hurt themselves, they will!!

Hope all your pups and cats are well!

 

 

Meg’s annual health check up

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.

Meg and Dotti enjoying their new yard
Meg, Steven the foster greyhound, and Dotti

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?