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KF_in_Georgia

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Everything posted by KF_in_Georgia

  1. Is anyone cooking lamb? Some dogs react badly to the smell. Otherwise, something he's hearing. Don't ignore ordinary noises, either. My two are fine with the landscapers and their industrial-strength blowers--will go right up to the landscape crew (the humans are not as thrilled by the company). But if they can hear the blower but not see the landscaper, my girl insists on going in the house because the blower sounds like an enormous buzzing insect. (The sound sets my teeth on edge.)
  2. Have you lost any socks lately? My Jane was about 8 years old, and she'd been with me less than two months when she started vomiting after every meal. More than a month after the first episode, she barfed up a sock. Not a full ankle sock with a cuff; just one of those foot-covering little things. Ten days later, she barfed up a second one. (Lesson learned: I no longer drop my socks in the floor.) After the first sock came back, she stopped vomiting her meals. Apparently, with my footwear in her stomach, she didn't have room for a cup and a half of kibble at mealtime. An ultrasound had revealed "something" (small, badly formed and unidentifiable) but the vet was concerned that he might be seeing a cancerous growth. She had kept eating the cup and a half every meal: the spirit was willing, but the stomach was...crowded. I was so worried about the weight she was losing that I had started feeding her less, more often. Instead of a cup and a half at mealtime, I cut her back to one cup, three times a day, and she was able to keep that down. And once she returned both socks, we went back to a cup and a half at mealtime. The vomiting had been her only symptom. Peeing and pooping normally, and her appetite only declined after weeks; I think she was tired of vomiting all the time. But she got very affectionate. She was a broodbitch/queen-of-the-castle type in her first home and very independent, but once she started feeling bad, she got clingy and I'd wake up in the morning with her head on my shoulder. She recovered completely--although she became a total mama's girl. She's still going strong and had her 14th birthday last Friday. Amy might not have eaten a sock, but it's possible she got into something she hasn't digested well. Perhaps try feeding her less food more often and see if that helps at all. Good luck to you both.
  3. And, despite the name, stud tail isn't gender-related. My girl has it, my boy does not.
  4. I've been using Bravecto on my dogs for years with no complications. I'm using it on my girl (13 years, 9 months old) and boy (9 years, 5 months), and have been using it on these two for as long as I've had them--six years. None of my dogs have ever been prone to seizures. I'd avoid Bravecto (or anything like it) if seizures were a problem in this household. But I did therapy dog events for years with the two dogs I lost in 2016 (osteo in the boy, hemangio in the old lady), and I wanted "pet-able" dogs around seniors and kids--not dogs with a toxin on the back of their necks. P.S. I've never had a vet try to sneak any pesticide on one of my dogs.
  5. It could be something treatable. It could be a pulled muscle that she keeps tweaking, and restricted activity might be helpful. (Especially since she's injured it before.) It might at least be something that won't get worse. I would try to push for the trazadone unless the vet can give you a good reason not to do it. You may have to insist--asking why they're in so much of a hurry they can't make Daisy comfortable.
  6. If he's hearing something that upsets him--humming machinery or something--there might be something in the office that masks the upsetting sound. Did the behavior change happen when you turned on the furnace?
  7. Best thing a vet once told me: If there are potentially complicated cases, they get done first. The no-problem cases get shifted to late in the day. This was his message when I dropped off two dogs at 6am and didn't have any word from him by 3:30. Both dogs were fine. When I picked them up, the girl was still so looped that I had to carry her to the car. She wouldn't step over the threshold from one kind of floor to another because her depth perception was screwed.
  8. Jen, I'm so sorry to read this. You'll find the strength to do what's necessary because you won't let your girl suffer. Give her a Reese's peanut butter cup before she sees the vet. One vet has said no dog should have to die without having had chocolate; my inclination is to step it up to include peanut butter.
  9. You need to use a buckle collar; a martingale is a closed loop, and you need a collar that only becomes a closed loop once you buckle it. Feed one loose end of the collar through the strap of the muzzle, then fasten the collar. If she keeps trying to lick or chew her stitches, use duct tape over the relevant holes in the muzzle to keep her from reaching the stitches. If you don't have a buckle collar, you can use a piece of ribbon or something like that. (Just tie a bow--not anything you'll have to cut loose.) The goal is to keep her from pulling the muzzle's strap over her head. If you can't slide the muzzle off once you've tied or buckled it, she won't be able to, either.
  10. I can't really give advice. When my Tigger had osteo just below his knee, we euthanized him as soon as the diagnosis was clear. He already was unsteady on his feet--that's why we went to the ER on a Friday night after he fell in the living room and couldn't get back up without help. I had a therapy dog visit with my other dog scheduled for Saturday, and I had a horror of Tigger hurting himself while he was home alone. (I had to drive my first greyhound to the ER when she broke her leg, and she screamed in the car all the way. I intend to avoid ever doing that again.) But I saw a suggestion on Facebook: A vet said no dog should have to leave without ever having tasted chocolate. (Their vet's office has a jar of Hershey's kisses labeled "Goodbye kisses.") Ernie will let you know when it's time. Give him a yummy Reese's peanut butter cup and a kiss before you say goodbye. I wish I'd done that for Tigger. I did feed Sam (sausage-egg biscuits from McDonald's) and Silver (cheese burgers; she spat out the pickles). Oreo died in surgery (embolism) and Jacey was enormously sick at the end.
  11. My boy once hooked a canine on a wire in his crate. He panicked, jerked his head, and broke the tooth up by the gumline. Emergency surgery to remove the tooth, lots of swelling, soft food for two weeks, and now an eternal derp opportunity out the gap.
  12. I have a healthy 13-year-old former brood bitch in my home. I've had her for 5 years, now. She's lovely. She sleeps all day, but she does it next to me. Sometimes, she leans her head on me and appears to be watching Braves baseball with me. Your girl would be unlikely to play with your kids, but greyhounds generally don't romp with children. But I bet your kids could read to her. (My angel therapy dog Silver sometimes "listened with her eyes closed.") I'm in a condo with a two-pet limit, and I'm maxed out at that, but I wouldn't hesitate to take in an older dog.
  13. Sounds like SLO: Symmetrical lupoid onychodystrophy See here for a Facebook group that addresses this problem: https://www.facebook.com/groups/131575517003777 Also see: https://www.dvm360.com/view/pivotal-pedicure-understanding-slo
  14. My two get trazadone for thunder. It really knocks them out. The problem is that I need to get it into them before the first clap of thunder. (Q goes nearly rigid, and prying his jaws apart to get a pill into him is difficult.) They don't have good hiding places here. In the past, I've played a white noise app on my cellphone for a dog, and that seemed to work. (She put her head down on the phone and went to sleep.) Sometimes I have Alexa play thunderstorm noises in hopes that the inside noises will beat the outside noises, and sometimes that works. (Works better when my electricity isn't flickering.) But my two are so stressed, and I'm afraid one of them will literally die of fear. I have a 67-pound boy and a 53-pound girl (she's 13 years old). The vet prescribed 1 to 1.5 pills (100 mg pills). I've never given more than one pill per dog. (Oh, jolly: the weather forecast for Marietta, Georgia, is thunderstorms Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. We're expecting bits of Elsa.) You can try cotton balls in Nate's ears and louder-than-usual television or music. Sometimes you need something over the dog's head to keep the cotton in place; try cutting the top "tube" off a tube sock; that should be stretchy enough to be comfortable. (Some people have used ace bandages.) My two are thunderphobes, but they were okay with the fireworks last night. I had the TV on CNN, where they were showing firework displays that had muffled thumps for sound--in between music performances. The fireworks in my neighborhood sounded much like the TV thumps, and my guys ignored them all. I went out last night with the trash at 11pm, and the folks a few blocks away were still at it.
  15. At one time we were considering an MRI when Jacey appeared to be having mild seizures. The vet said not to do the MRI: If there was a tumor or something causing the behavior, there was nothing we could do about it, and there wasn't much an MRI could reveal that we could treat. Sorry Violet is having trouble. I'm so grateful that my 13-year-old Jane is mentally and physically sound. Knock wood.
  16. Maybe try the jumbo-sized cotton balls in his ears. He may be hearing something that's bothering him. (If he shakes his head and sends the cotton balls flying, try cotton balls and make a "sleeve" out of the top tube of a sock to help keep his ears flat on his head and the cotton balls inside.) My girl isn't normally afraid of anything except thunder. But last year, I was hanging outside with the dogs on a couple of nice days, and Jane kept wanting to go back into the house. I finally realized she wanted inside on the days the landscapers were out with leaf-blowers, either in my condo complex or the one behind mine. And I realized that when I realized I was clenching my jaw against that leaf-blower noise. To Jane, I think it sounded like a huge buzzing insect. For me, it was just exactly the wrong pitch. (Think power saw squealing on concrete.) Normally, my condo complex is quiet. But I've had Georgia DOT crews installing deep-set piles for expressway bridges, and we heard (and felt) every thump as they drove the piles. I have neighbors who like to do carpentry in their carports--especially over the weekend--and their power saws are loud. Has your air conditioning recently started up for the season? Or maybe a neighbors' with a noisy system? At your house, it's been 4 days, so what has happened recently?
  17. I think I only concentrated on that timing when I was taking Sam in for bloodwork. I think that timing resulted in optimum amounts showing up in his bloodwork. But just giving him a thyroid pill at mealtimes would produce optimal results at some point in time that wasn't critical unless we were drawing blood to test.
  18. You might have better luck trying to get an appointment with a veterinary dermatologist. (Yes, they exist.) Try Googling "veterinary dermatologist" and add your zip code. Google should give you the address of the one nearest to you. I had a greyhound rescue who arrived (from the pound) with a chronic rash on one front leg. A year later--after three different vets (one a greyhound expert) and multiple skin scrapings and tests--her vet gave me a referral to a dermatologist. After a punch biopsy, it turned out to be a bacterial infection on the outside of her leg (she'd been taking cephalexin and other antibiotics but they didn't fix it) and ringworm below the surface of the skin (being below the surface is what kept it from registering as a fungal infection in the skin scrapings). Dermatologist prescribed cephalexin for the bacteria part and ketoconazole pills for the fungal part. The itching stopped within days, and the rash was gone in a couple of weeks. It never came back, and her hair grew back completely. I wanted to kick myself for having put her through a year of cephalexin and other antibiotics, lots of expensive vet visits, and constant itching. (She chewed her leg constantly. When I muzzled her, she learned to scratch her front leg with her back leg.) The dermatologist was not cheap, but it would have cost less than I spent on treatments that didn't work in that first year.
  19. A friend of mine had a champion agility greyhound, Katie, who suffered an FCE at the age of 12. Jennifer blogged about rehabbing Katie, and her posts are under the tag KATIE NEUROLOGICAL: http://neversaynevergreyhounds.blogspot.com/search/label/Katie Neurological
  20. Sounds as though it could be a stroke. Can you take him to an ER tonight? Dogs generally survive strokes, but I think he may need to be seen soon to minimize complications. https://www.care.com/c/stories/6485/strokes-in-dogs-everything-you-need-to-know/
  21. Link to CBS story: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/seresto-collar-recall/
  22. It's also possible that any problem with the collars is a small-dog problem. The dog named in the article was a Papillon. Perhaps the collars right-out-of-the-box are too strong for small dogs.
  23. I'd do the x-rays, and try not to borrow trouble. In the worst case scenario, they may tell you his leg's about to break from cancer, and you'd have to let him go. But would you rather know and be able to decide for the best? Or not know and be horribly surprised an hour or a day later--maybe when you and Charlie are on a walk and you have no way to get him home? (And I think the vet could let him wake up enough after x-rays to know you're there, and you could be with him the way you want to be.) Or, better: It's an injury and meds will help enormously. Or they may tell you to restrict activity for a while. But there is an advantage to having an x-ray--in knowing what you're dealing with. I don't think uncontrollable leg pain would come from much short of cancer.
  24. Yes, it could be dementia. But see if you can think of things that have changed. Are you keeping windows open at night? Could he be hearing sounds through open windows that he wasn't hearing previously? (A neighbor's air conditioner coming on? Mine roars like a jet plane.) A few years ago, Georgia Department of Transportation was adding an expressway bridge about 2 miles from my condo, and they were driving piles into the ground--usually at night, when there was less traffic on the roads. I could hear it when we were outside for a walk, so I'm sure my two greyhounds heard it, too. A neighbor going to work at an odd hour--or coming home? Years ago, my first greyhound's favorite neighbor was a bartender who got off work at 2am; she learned to recognize the sound of his pickup over all other traffic noises. (He's not a bartender any more, but he's still the dogs' favorite neighbor...and every dog I've had has learned to recognize the sound of his truck. Meanwhile, his vocal Australian shepherd hears us when we go out for a walk, and I'm sure Butch wants to know why his dog is waking him up at night.) My 12-year-old greyhound started freaking out over the summer and insisting on going back in the house when she heard leaf-blowers...from a neighboring condo complex. She's not afraid of the blowers in our neighborhood; she can see the landscapers and see what they're doing. But leaf-blowers from a distance, when she can't see the people, just buzz and sound like the world's largest hornets, and they terrified her. Ask your vet. Ask about CBD chews to calm your boy--one tasty treat at bedtime might smooth over everything. (My two each get a CBD chew during thunderstorms. They expect them, and I'm not sure the dogs aren't hoping for thunder every time we get rain.)
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