Post by Otter on Oct 5, 2015 16:21:29 GMT
We have all heard to get a 2nd opinion when the Dr gives us horrible news.
Last week I was vividly reminded the same should hold true for vets.
I came home from a 10 day trip (my new nephew is nicknamed Moose and I was watching his older siblings, twins, while he had an extended hospital stay) and Sunni, the dog in my profile pic, walked slowly out to greet me home.
Nine hours later, our regular vet is closed due to a funeral and we are at a new place. They are packed so I say yes when they ask if they can take Sunni into the back to draw blood. Forty minutes later (they've had her back there the whole time) I'm asked into an exam room where they bring her out, tell me she tested positive for EVERYTHING* ($400 worth of tests, I hadn't approved anything but a standard bloodwork) and has pyometra, to put her on these antibiotics and she needs surgery after she's been on them 3 days. Oh, and she could experience severe bleeding during surgery due to ehrlichiosis.
She'd been treated for ehrlichiosis before, ticks have been horrible this year and I think we've all been treated for some sort of tick borne illness. The titers stay positive for months, but the dog doesn't actually develop immunity and can be re-infected. New infection? Old infection? No idea
*everything was hookworms, ehrlichiosis and infection
Thank heaven he threw in that last bit, because that put me on the hunt for a vet who could deal with the possibility of bleed out during surgery or treat her medically.
During that search, which involved days of endlessly calling other vets (lost count around 9), none of whom wanted to deal with that combination, a university, driving an hour and a half to another vet who didn't actually want to examine her (and who didn't, just spoke to us) we began to suspect that Vet1 was wrong.
She was doing much more than stabilizing on the antibiotics, she was responding.
Her appetite came back, her fever vanished, her activity levels bounced back. With pyometra, this should not have happened.
She also never had or developed any pyo-specific symptoms. And she should have. She should have been on death's door by the time we said "To heck with trying to get an appointment" and jumped her (yeah, she jumped) into the car to see the vet who ended up not even examining her. All the vets wanted to basically CYA by saying "Spay her now!", no one except the University would actually do it except for our regular vet who would have done an after hours, emergency surgery 5 days after her diagnosis if I couldn't find anyone else. None of them thought she actually had pyo, and all wanted to see the first ultrasound and get a 2nd before they'd touch her (the university would have run a staggering amount of tests right there)
Emergency surgery day, she was chasing squirrels and wrestling with Chex so we didn't have it.
While hopefully, this will never happen to you, and if it does, I truly hope you don't have to go on the same kind of quest we did for a second opinion, I am very, very glad we did not just panic and give her a surgery that she didn't need, and that might have killed her. And I am hugely grateful to the University of MO, who were the first and only ones with the courage to say "These tests look inconclusive. It could be other things. I wouldn't do surgery on this dog until I had checked for X,Y & Z"
In 2 weeks, she should be showing clear signs of false pregnancy, real pregnancy (if I was wrong about when she was in heat) or in heat, if her last heat was in some way abnormal. All non-lethal.
Last week I was vividly reminded the same should hold true for vets.
I came home from a 10 day trip (my new nephew is nicknamed Moose and I was watching his older siblings, twins, while he had an extended hospital stay) and Sunni, the dog in my profile pic, walked slowly out to greet me home.
Nine hours later, our regular vet is closed due to a funeral and we are at a new place. They are packed so I say yes when they ask if they can take Sunni into the back to draw blood. Forty minutes later (they've had her back there the whole time) I'm asked into an exam room where they bring her out, tell me she tested positive for EVERYTHING* ($400 worth of tests, I hadn't approved anything but a standard bloodwork) and has pyometra, to put her on these antibiotics and she needs surgery after she's been on them 3 days. Oh, and she could experience severe bleeding during surgery due to ehrlichiosis.
She'd been treated for ehrlichiosis before, ticks have been horrible this year and I think we've all been treated for some sort of tick borne illness. The titers stay positive for months, but the dog doesn't actually develop immunity and can be re-infected. New infection? Old infection? No idea
*everything was hookworms, ehrlichiosis and infection
Thank heaven he threw in that last bit, because that put me on the hunt for a vet who could deal with the possibility of bleed out during surgery or treat her medically.
During that search, which involved days of endlessly calling other vets (lost count around 9), none of whom wanted to deal with that combination, a university, driving an hour and a half to another vet who didn't actually want to examine her (and who didn't, just spoke to us) we began to suspect that Vet1 was wrong.
She was doing much more than stabilizing on the antibiotics, she was responding.
Her appetite came back, her fever vanished, her activity levels bounced back. With pyometra, this should not have happened.
She also never had or developed any pyo-specific symptoms. And she should have. She should have been on death's door by the time we said "To heck with trying to get an appointment" and jumped her (yeah, she jumped) into the car to see the vet who ended up not even examining her. All the vets wanted to basically CYA by saying "Spay her now!", no one except the University would actually do it except for our regular vet who would have done an after hours, emergency surgery 5 days after her diagnosis if I couldn't find anyone else. None of them thought she actually had pyo, and all wanted to see the first ultrasound and get a 2nd before they'd touch her (the university would have run a staggering amount of tests right there)
Emergency surgery day, she was chasing squirrels and wrestling with Chex so we didn't have it.
While hopefully, this will never happen to you, and if it does, I truly hope you don't have to go on the same kind of quest we did for a second opinion, I am very, very glad we did not just panic and give her a surgery that she didn't need, and that might have killed her. And I am hugely grateful to the University of MO, who were the first and only ones with the courage to say "These tests look inconclusive. It could be other things. I wouldn't do surgery on this dog until I had checked for X,Y & Z"
In 2 weeks, she should be showing clear signs of false pregnancy, real pregnancy (if I was wrong about when she was in heat) or in heat, if her last heat was in some way abnormal. All non-lethal.