dogs

[ritaxis]

I haven't been here in almost a week. I've been home, but I haven't been at livejournal.

We had super dog drama. Truffle got sicker and sicker. She was twitching and trembling and noit eating and not wanting to do anything. She was so bad that the extra dog stopped bullying her. I finally convinced the nice fellow to take her to the vet -- or rather, he decided on his own that he ought to take her in, because she didn't get better -- and she was diagnosed with kidney failure which they eventually confirmed was Addison';s disease, which is the good news, because it's treatable with fairly simple drug regimen. Cortisone for life. She got a jolt of mood elevators and prednisone and acid reducers to get her going (after the IV fluids and stuff at the vet's): and we don't have to give her peanut butter or anything to get her to take these pills. She pounces on them. She loves her some Prednisone. (Prednisone is the drug that made me crazy when I first hurt my hands)

So now she's ravenous and can go for short walks without exhaustion and she barks her fool head now and then. And Roxy's back to innocently lying in the way so Truffle gets blocked from whatever she wants to do.

And, Frank has passed all his tests except he still has his Anatomy oral test to do. And he'll be home in three weeks!

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I'm glad Truffle's diagnosis meant that the problem was solved.

Congratulations to Frank. Gosh, that first year seems to have gone by so quickly!

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Yaaay, Frank!

And how wonderful that not only is Truffle's illness easily handled, but she likes her meds! (And that prednisone is cheap!)

[katiekin.livejournal.com]

My use of prednisone made me rather crazy too. But then the condition it was for made me even crazier so it was a net benefit. And it worked FAST!

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I remember that -- you said "We thought we had never had enough strawberries" and proceeded to giove yourself the most monstrous case of hives known to humankind . . .

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Ack!

[katiekin.livejournal.com]

Well, actually there were two events. The strawberries was one, but I didn't take prednisone for that.

The truly horrific one was when I picked a very young new leaf of poison ivy or oak (never can remember which is which) peeking in it's lonesome from behind a fence (why I didn't id the plant) and crushing it, smelled it strongly, rubbed it all over myself inadvertently, esp. all over my face.

The alergin entered my bloodstream through all the fine veins in the face and my entire body reacted, I literally could not voluntarily stop scratching -- my nervous system reacted involuntarily -- and I was in agony.

So you can see prednisone's side effects were worth getting that stopped no matter what.

Still, long term use is obviously another story. Figuring out the actual body systems involved in side effects is pretty astonding as well.

[katiekin.livejournal.com]

Oh, and how it made me crazy was that I either sat in a corner shivering with -- I don't know -- axial excitation or such, or was so tired I could hardly keep going for needed tasks. I remember having gone up to school and got so tired I wasn't sure I'd make it home on the bus. Waiting at the bus stop I had a vision of all the paths I could take from that moment on through my life, including going home or dying at the bus stop. Very Mu'addeb (sp? Dune allusion). Just to illustrate the various forms of crazy involved.

And they were all much better than the scratching.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I was on long-term high-dose prednisone long enough to become Cushingoid, and I still have some of those effects (buffalo hump, and although my eyebrows don't grow completely up into my hairline, there's still a faint swathe of hairs there). It took me a long time to get off once there were better lung meds. I still get it occasionally in dosepaks when my breathing is particularly bad. It's really a wonder drug, it just has some unpleasant effects.