greyhead

So very, very sorry for your losses and what must be immense grief.

You and handsome Mike had a wonderful run together. I'm so sorry it had to end.

What an amazing tribute to your longtime friend. I'm so sorry he had to leave now.

A beautiful tribute to the best dog ever.

So very, very sorry for the loss of your precious boy.

Godspeed Sugar.

I should have clarified...we give the Adequan SQ, and we give it over the shoulder. In *that* location, across the back and shoulders, the network of nerves on dogs is finer than it is on cats, thus making the smaller-gauge needle preferable. (I don't know how it compares in any other location.) And the SQ method is leading to good results for us.

My feelings are the same as Kyle's. Glad Jilly's feeling well enough now, even if stumbly. Hugs to all.

I'm terribly sorry.

Our vet has us use a 25g needle on our greys, which is smaller than we used to use on our cats! Surprisingly, they said the network of nerves is more extensive in the hounds, requiring the smaller gauge. ETA: We've used bigger needles to give sub-q fluids, or else we'd never have gotten finished!

Hugs and scritches to Jilly! So glad to hear she's doing well.

They should never leave.

Happy Birthday, big guy!

We had this problem with our first grey, starting a month or two after he came to us. A full thyroid panel showed him to be hypothyroid. He only got reactive like that when he felt threatened, as yours seems to do. He had a couple other symptoms, like low stamina for walks (tired after half-mile) and mild seizures. Those problems stopped immediately upon starting medication. Some argue that greys are never hypothyroid, but those of us who have such greys think it's worth checking out. It seems the period shortly after neutering (within a few months) is one likely time for it to emerge as a problem. It is also true that while he's feeling vulnerable, mistakes such as stepping on his tail must not be made! Our experience was that after medication, our dog reverted to the tolerant, confident creature he had been previously. YMMV, of course. Good luck, as I know how disconcerting this is! (We also had a hookworm problem that wasn't diagnosed until later. Between the hooks and the thyroid situation, we had to drop out of obedience training because our dog just couldn't relax enough to learn then in a group context. We wound up training him at home and with our local greyhound friends.)

Come, wait, leave it, down, back, up, outside, walk, this way (follow me), let's go, food, milk, dinner, meatball, good boy, open (for pills), swallow (or I'll have to help you with that pill), leg (lift to get leash untangled), okay (get out of car), no, you're okay (nothing to worry about), and HEY (stop what you're doing and freeze). Spencer also is especially able, when motivated, to figure out what is being said using tone, context, and body language even if he doesn't know the words being used. But his genius is fading to the extent his geriatric status is advancing and leaving him more confused, bless his heart.

Just checking in for an update, as I imagine your vet visit is about over by now. I so very much hope everything went well. The problem of getting Da Vid in the car is not trivial!

Liza, Tovi's pattern of hair loss doesn't look like the pattern I've seen in thyroid dogs, which involves more the sides, chest and throat, as well as the bum, but not the back.

This confuses me because even though the thyroid may produce adequate T4, it's not fully useful if too much of it is bound to proteins in the blood, which only a free-T4 test would indicate. Is that not of interest too in understanding whether there is sufficient usable thyroid hormone available to the animal? Or are we only concerned with the health of the thyroid gland itself?

No advice, just hopes and prayers that things improve quickly. (Is there any chance that consulting with the surgeon by phone before the weekend would be a good idea? If I were the surgeon, I wouldn't want bad aftercare -- theirs, not yours -- messing up my work!)

Tracy, you're the nicest head-butter I know! The thing about de-bunking is this. If aggression happens rarely in hypo-t greyhounds or other dogs, which I don't doubt, then it won't attain "statistical significance" in any kind of study. But a symptom doesn't have to have statistical significance in order to have "clinical significance." All I know is that Spencer's aggression problem vanished with the use of Soloxine, and that he's not the only greyhound whose owner has observed this connection. So, yes, it does come down to the OP's wallet...but I keep making these points to beseech people to treat their dogs as individuals and not fail to explore the very real roads less traveled. But it's also true that we've seen people spend enormous sums of money on lots of testing, some of it expensive radiography looking for brain tumors, without ever running a thyroid panel! And we know that panel is not that expensive, especially compared to an MRI, for instance. So as testing goes, thyroid panels are relatively cheap and easy to do, and the condition is relatively cheap and easy to treat.

Our first grey started showing what I'd call reactive aggression, mild seizures, and low stamina for walks a couple months after he came to our home. We did have a complete thyroid panel run and decided he was hypothyroid. (It was enough years and vets ago that I don't recall his original numbers. I'm sure his total and free T4's and free T3 were low, but I don't recall the TSH status. Since TSH is wrong 15-30% of the time anyway, that wouldn't have decided the outcome.) All those problems disappeared as soon as he started thyroid medicine. This can be a life-and-death issue for dogs, so I'd urge you not to bend over backwards in resisting a diagnosis of hypothyroidism, especially if the aggression has stopped since the medicine was started. (Our vet at that time had already put down two greyhounds for aggression, one of them her own, without ever testing for hypothyroidism. How sad is that?) Thats a vet I would never use... To be clear, we left that practice shortly thereafter. (We had the thyroid tested by the practice's other vet anyway.) But the vet you would never use is one who put herself forward as the greyhound specialist of the practice. Believing that greyhounds are never hypothyroid became common among such vets back then. And now even when the complete panel is run, there's tremendous pressure to interpret the test numbers in very rigid ways. The wise doctor knows to "treat the patient, not the numbers."

Just catching up to this. I just read your aggression thread and replied there about our experience with that and hypothyroidism. I'd say aggression IS a clinical symptom, though not one frequently seen, so I'd have the panel done. I'd take that Babesia finding seriously too. The vet on the Tick List, Dr. Beckett, says any positive finding is significant, and the size of the titer doesn't mean much because a high titer just means the body is mounting a big immune response while a lower titer may just mean that the body is incapable of the immune response it needs to be making. So the dog with the lower titer may be sicker than the one with a higher titer. Here again, symptoms are important to consider. Our Babesia dog has led a much better life (and one with lower creatinine values) since he was treated for it, and IIRC his titer was lower than your dog's. Good luck with your commendable and considerable efforts to educate yourself about these things and to work with your dog's situation.