Monday, December 29

Today was interesting. We had a macaw with a neurological disorder come in, three snakes come in for boarding, various other appointments, and then a silver (I think she was actually brown with an activated dilution gene) Shepherd-type mix come in for what we originally thought was poisining.

I'll start with the macaw because her story is shorter. I wasn't there long enough to find out what she was diagnosed with, but the macaw came to us because she'd been exhibiting the inability to balance and random, uncontrollable shaking of her head for about three months (since the owner got her). She would also take a few steps and fall, take a few steps and fall, etc. whenever she walked. The owners said she could fly fine, but couldn't climb. The bird was quite affectionate but very obviously had a neurological disorder. I'll update when I find out what they diagnosed her with.

Long story short, the owners had a bit of sand—that had mixed with the contents of a busted aerosol can filled with rose insecticide—in the corner of the yard. They have four dogs and none of the dogs seemed interested in the pile. Then this morning, they saw Ashley (the dog) digging through and eating from the sand. She then staggered into the house, layed down, and defecated on herself. They brought her in immediately. When she came in, her temperature registered at 97.5°. A dog's temperature should be around 101°. 99° would be something to be concerned about so as you can tell...97.5° is much too low! She was very cold to the touch. We looked up the ingredients in the particular formulation of insecticide they said had busted in the sand and even checked with a few other sources and found that these particular ingredients would not poison a dog. In the meanwhile, we got a catheter in (it took about six tries between the different nurses who tried because Ashley's blood pressure was terrible! Poor pup.) and started fluids on her. We also put some warm towels on her and placed some warm fluid bags beneath the towels to help get her temperature up. We drew blood and Dr. D ran a CBC on it...there were four values that were abnormally high (I will update with the names of the values after I go back on Friday) which indicated trouble with the kidney and the liver. So Dr. D began to think of alternatives...one of which included that perhaps Ashley was suffering from ethylene glycol poisoning. Ethylene glycol poisoning is what happens to dogs when they eat antifreeze. We promptly called up one of the local emergency clinics to order an ethylene glycol test. While we were waiting for an estimate on the cost of that, Dr. D did an ultrasound on Ashley. He extracted urine from her bladder and in the process discovered that Ashley had ascites (fluid in the abdomen). This meant that perhaps the situation was even more serious than we were already worried it was. Dr. D extracted some of the fluid from the abdomen...it was blood! The blood clotted in a few minutes which indicated that Ashley was still actively bleeding. This is when we called the closest Animal Diagnostic Center. I don't know exactly why Dr. D wanted to send Ashley there but we knew that in order to figure out exactly what was going on with her, we were going to have to do an abdominal exploratory surgery anyway so he called them up. I left around this time, but he had Ashley's owners come pick her up and bring her to the ADC. I really hope things turn out for the better for this pup; she was a sweet, pretty little gal. I'll update when I found out how things went with her as well.