Dog Days

On Saturday night (I think it was Saturday night), Tim and I were getting ready for bed and as he turned out the light, the sound of insanely loud panting filled the air. "Is that Cassi?" Tim turned the light back on and looked at the dog who was, in fact, laying there panting, her sides heaving as if she'd just run a marathon. We went back and forth with her trying to get her to drink some water (she wasn't thirsty), moved her to the bathroom tile in case she was hot (she wasn't), and so forth and so on. Finally, Tim gave up and went to sleep. A few hours after that I ended up moving to the guest room because the snoring and the panting were just not going to let me get any shut eye.

The next morning, she didn't really eat. She didn't really eat dinner that night either. And the panting. Oh, the panting.

So, half way through Monday I called the vet and explained what was going on and they said to go ahead and bring her in. And so yesterday found us at the vet for two hours while they did bloodwork and a chest x-ray and various other pokes and prods. Right now they can't come up with an underlying issue, but her platelet count is crazy low (normal is something like 170,000 and she's at 42,000) and she's borderline anemic (normal is 37 something (thousand?) and she's at 38.5). Before we left yesterday they gave her a steroid shot and set us home with antibiotics. Today they called and are putting her on oral prednisone as well. On the positive side, with the steroids, she's actually eating again.

We'll take her back in a week and see what we can see. Hopefully we can figure out what's going on, though I worry that they'll end up deciding it's something bad (they said multiple times that they couldn't rule out cancer yet), because no matter how much I love my puppy, I'm not putting her through chemo at 13. And while I don't want to have to make a decision to put her down, I think that may be coming at us sooner than I'd hoped.