Dante and the vet

Sandi, we are not subjecting our pet to unnecessary suffering..at least not knowingly. We don't even have the facts yet since we are waiting to get the results for the sonogram although behaviorlly there is no sign of illness. I have never in my life had pets respond to a vet like this. I have had pets since I was 5 years old. I don't normally expect a pet be traumatized by what is supposed to be a routine exam. No one wants to believe a medical professional would be abusive to the patients in their care and it has been difficult to discern what has been going on the past 1 1/2 weeks.

Nancy, hopefully things will be better. Even if Dante is very sick, Dr Barnes was wonderful when our cats were sick. Just having a sane compassionate vet who returns phone calls is a plus whatever the results are of the test today.

Katherine, I will check it out and ask Dr. Barnes on Thursday.  The people who did the sonogram were internist specialists (whereas Dr. Barnes is a GP).  He just called us immediately when the results were in because he knew we were waiting and thought it would be worse news.  He is off Wed.  but he is taking everything home and going to look at it all again and decide what drugs Dante needs etc and we will touch base again on Thursda and start some of the tratment.  I am not a medical person but they feel fairly certain that the kidney issues are an infection from the kinds of tissue things they saw on the sonogram and are very likely not kidney disease.  I am still in a lot of shock from the trauma of dealing with the other vets so I am just not ready to dance around quite yet until after he gets antibiotics and they retest the kidney levels.  Last year, his kidney levels were perfect.

We have had 2 cats with kidney disease and he does not look like he has kidney disease.  It is hard to explain.  With Mowgli, we just knew long before because of Jean Claude and so we asked the vet to check..sure enough, Mowgli was showing slightly elevated levels.  I know kidney disease is not curable.  Our last 2 cats died of it but both had many good active years from the diagnosis to the end.  These local vets...I canb't explain it to you other than to say lots of things just did not add up.

The arthritis is hard to tell.  He is not a puppy but 18 years old, so he is not as limber as he once was.  Nevertheless, he can can go up and down more flights of stairs than Glenn and I can do combined (at least when he has not been traumatized).  At times he just runs circles around the house for the sheer joy of it.   He wasn't like that for 1 1/2 weeks after he saw the local vet though.  He was so traumatized that I thought he was dying but 2 days ago, he started to perk up and even after tonight after a trip to the hospital, he is not traumatized.  

Tonight, I am just really happy that the sonogram made things more clear.  The first vets had us fairly convinced that Dante had tumors and could die in weeks (Yet they still wanted to clean his teeth?).  I am fairly relieved that the results are something that can be managed with medicine.  I will be thrilled if the kidney issues do indeed resolve with antibiotics.  I don't understand it but something how it looked on the sonogram and something to do with the way kidneys are is why they feel fairly certain it is a kidney/urinary tract infection and not kidney disease.

Katherine T., I am not sure I told you this before.  My first cousin has Lupus.  I was an only child but she was kind of like a sister to me when I was growing up.  She was one year younger than me and we played togethrer all the time.  She is doing very well now, much better than years ago.  I don't know that much about Lupus, however, because I was far from home when she was diagnosed and when she was not doing as well as she is today.  (She still lives far away.)

Katherine, I have just been looking at the Cushing syndrome. I can't believe it...so many things are making sense now. We have been testing him regularly because of his thyroid meds and it is only now with the sonogram that things make sense because his tests were normal til now. Things that this horrible vet told us were behavioral are actually symptoms of Cushing syndrome (panting, large intake of water). I know having this syndrome isn't a great thing, and we do need to be careful of the kidneys even right now it is an infection, but I am so relieved to know that we can do somethng to help that was not at all what we were led to believe for the past 1 1/2 weeks.

I feel like I could just read straight for a week snd just chill out from it all. 

Good points Nancy and Amanda! One thing I do like is Dr. Barnes and really everyone in his office ---they get to know the pets. Hearing a pet is recently adopted or just moved does not pass him by. These other vets may have all the techniques and book knowledge but nothing is a substitute for listening or asking questions to get those clues and just be friendly along the way. Here's one difference. Those other vets had the results of the blood test for almost a busines week but never called or even returned our calls with inquiries. Even if the examining vet was not there, someone should have called, esp. since the tests indicated something. Dr. Barnes called us within minutes of the hospital's fax coming in with the sonogram results..after hours on a Tuesday before they were closed on Wednesday..and took all the tests home to decide which medications. Compassion matters. I am just thankful that debiw told me a story that helped me turn to my dog and what I know about him versus the froth being stirred up by the vets that was not normal. I know illness can cause changes but this was way too drastic.

We are going there to pick up his antibiotics this afternoon and it
looks likes we are going to have the same strange weather today that we
had yesterday.   The rush hour trek across the urban corridor north to
south with Denver in between may not be fun.  They are forecasting
torrential rains, possible flash floods and some mudslides to the west
of where we are going.  We don't get a lot of rain here so the roads
don't have run off.  I used to sort of think it was odd--people would
say it was raining hard here but my NC gauge would have called it a
drizzle.  But the weather is truly different here.  It's like I have
had to recalibrate my internal danger system.  Lightning here is more
frequent and dangerous in skies that look mild. Radars that look mild
compared to NC radar colors can bring serious weather.  On the other
hand, we can get 60-75 mph winds in clear skies that do little damage. 
If I felt that kind of wind in NC even in a clear sky it would mean to
get to a shelter.

Really? I had never experienced Chinook winds until I moved out here. I love wind. I love falling asleep when the winds are going but I know there is no danger of tornadoes etc. I love reading when it rains (or snows!) or when the wind is blowing.  I really love non-tornado producing thunderstorms...when I am inside.

We lived 5 miles from the Rocky Mountain foothills in Lakewood, Colorado (and where the good vet is). We could see the mountains out our west windows. We are not as close to the foothills now. Even though we are basically directly north of where we were, the terrain to the west of us is different. I think it would be fascinating to look at weather and geography. Storms in NC would often be bad west of us, skip over Chapel Hill, but get bad east of there in Durham and Raleigh. What made it skip? Even here, we can watch storms on the radar west of us skip, then pick up east of here. Sometimes you can even see the wind patterns in the clouds in the foothills in these strange shapes caused by the different layers of air/wind. The weather blowing off the mountains in waves explains it here but why in NC? Was it a lake or some other thing? This east to west pattern, however, isn't skipping.