KF_in_Georgia

Please add my Silver (fka Silver Hornet). 19 May 2005-27 October 2016.

Please add Dora: Ugo Dior Drive "Dora" 11/01/2009 - 11/01/2016 Dora was a phenomenally wonderful meet and greet dog. Weekly, she eagerly pranced her way to SEGA's booth at the Marietta Farmer's Market. She had a fan club of children (and adults) who visited her regularly, and they'll be devastated to learn she's gone.

I wonder if there are starting to be issues with Walgreen's itself. I have my own health insurance with Humana, and I went to Walgreen's for my flu shot. Turns out, Walgreen's no longer contracts with Humana.

From the National Canine Cancer Foundation: Although they aren't named in that list, greyhounds fit the description of "larger breeds." A Greyhound is more likely to suffer from osteosarcoma than a smaller breed is. But it's not necessarily related to racing since Great Danes, Irish setters, Doberman pinschers, Rotties, GSDs and Goldens are on the osteo list, and none of those breeds race. But osteo can appear in the same limbs as previous injuries, and if your retired racer has an old race injury, you might see any osteo that does occur show up in the previously injured leg. I've lost four greyhounds, and I have two at present: Oreo, lost to a blood clot during surgery at age 8, but the surgery was to repair a broken leg where osteo probably was present; she had unreadable tattoos, so I have no idea about her racing career except that I got her when she was 4 and she had bounced from another home so she couldn't have raced for long Jacey, lost to an unexpected immune system failure at age 8; a double-handful of not impressive races at one of the worst tracks in the country Sam, lost to a variety of old age symptoms at age 13; never raced, never trained Tigger, lost to osteo at nearly 9; he was a successful, long-term racer with no previous injuries recorded; son of Flying Penske, who is not from one of the more common osteo lines Silver, still chugging along at nearly 11 and a half; a successful racer until she retired with a slipped Achilles tendon eight years ago Q, just 4, retired with a bone screw in his hock after a mediocre racing career that ended with a crash in January So I've lost three 8-year-olds, and that's not common; one of them--maybe two of them--had osteo. Also, all the dogs but Silver were immediately spayed or neutered at the end of their careers. Silver wasn't spayed until I got my hands on her when she was six years old.

Has anyone even heard of a greyhound with throat cancer? I haven't, and if martingales could trigger throat cancer, we'd be hearing about it all the time.

I'd just ask your vet.

Google the drug. VetRxDirect appears to carry it for $2.26/pill. Google frequently. Prices I'm seeing today were not online Saturday.

From Vet Info ( https://www.vetinfo.com/treating-dog-hookworm-diatomaceous-earth.html): The Vet Info page has lots of good info on it. I treated my two with the nightly teaspoonful added to their kibble. (I added water and stirred because you don't want you dog sticking his nose in a bunch of the dry powder.) Once we finished the daily doses, we went to the every-third-day doses (basically, any calendar date divisible by 3). My girl doesn't love the DE, but she'll tolerate it. My boy doesn't seem to notice it. There was a noticeable improvement in poop at about the two-week mark: they both stopped producing yellowish, soft, foul-smelling mountains of poop.

Moisturized pads should have a better grip than smooth, dry pads.

Try putting a moisturizer of some sort on his pads for a few days. Typically, the pads will get softer and any corns will be much better defined. And the moisturizer won't do any harm. (Your own hand cream, Bag Balm, something like that. But nothing actually greasy or oily: You don't want him slipping and you don't want oily prints on the furniture.)

I've just texted: "Google in home pet euthanasia and add the zip code where the dog is."

Post a copy to an account on Google Drive or Dropbox. If you're away from home when trouble happens, you can get the files if you can get to the internet. Or keep the envelope in the trunk of your car provided it's not anything that would be harmed by excessive heat. (I have a disk of x-rays of my boy's hock.) Or email them to yourself and keep the email. Then you just call up the email on your smartphone and forward the mail to the vet.

Sorry, I don't have any experience with this and can't tell what I'm looking at. I agree that your vet is the best bet. But PhotoBucket offered to make me a calendar and holiday cards from the photo.

I had a lethargic and listless dog. Took her to the e-vet and they did blood work that determined her system was destroying its own platelets. She'd been at her vet's for a well-dog checkup on Tuesday; she was lethargic Thursday night, by Friday morning she was at the e-vet, and we put her to sleep on Monday, when there was no improvement after steroids and antibiotics. She was 8. They diagnosed immune mediated thrombocytopenia. I'm not telling you to scare you: if Snow's bloodwork was okay, she's not headed in the same direction Jacey went. But I wanted you to know that the visit to the e-vet was the right thing to do. Scary and expensive, but absolutely right.

My two (56 and 65 pounds) have each taken the 44-88 pound dose for a second time, now. They've had it with their morning kibble, and I've watched to make sure no one kicked it under the counter or something. (Actually my girl doesn't bother to hide it when she's unhappy about meds, but she's okay so far with Bravecto and her Interceptor.) No one's had any upsets from it. I found one flea on Q, and it was dead.

It's not so much anesthesia that's the issue with a vet that doesn't know greyhounds. But how many of us have had to explain a greyhound's thyroid numbers to our vet? Had our dogs diagnosed as having kidney disease because our dogs' numbers aren't the same as a lab's? How many of us have vets who see a limping greyhound and have "Corn" even cross their minds? Shoot, I took my boy to a substitute vet one Tuesday when he was limping. They x-rayed, she diagnosed a soft-tissue injury (and didn't show me the x-rays), and I had to put him to sleep three days later because the osteo on new x-rays was obvious and he was in agony. She had been so busy confirming her preliminary diagnosis of soft-tissue injury (rather than a break) that it never occurred to her to look at the x-ray in terms of what was making him limp.

Someone will post a link for you about bloodwork values and stuff. Valley is about 30 miles from Auburn's vet school, where they know greyhounds (literally) inside and out.

Many vets will authorize the robaxin over the phone, especially if they know the dog. It can't hurt to call and find out.

tbhounds: Great minds and all that... JetCityWoman, ask for a prescription for methocarbamol (aka Robaxin). I'm pretty sure it's okay with the other meds he's on, it's available at people pharmacies, and the vet might okay it without you having to take Ajax in right away. (Look it up on GoodRx.com for best prices.) It's a muscle relaxer. If Ajax is tensing up from the pain while trying to stand up or lie down, this should help. I had an elderly dog on it for a couple of years (along with tramadol and gabapentin; we stopped the meloxicam when he started having stomach trouible); Sam was having the same problems with pain when he tried to lie down, and he spent almost an entire night standing up, leaning against me. Then he walked into the vet's office and lay down without a yelp, neatly demolishing my argument that the vet needed to see him right away because of the pain. But the vet could tell Sam really was in pain by the way he moved and the way he flinched when the vet touched his back. My vet prescribed a first-day dosage of double the regular dosage, just to get a good loading dosage in there.

I'd ask the vet if her symptoms can be side effects of any of her meds. Is she, by any chance, taking metronidazole (flagyl) for anything? If so, look up "metronidazole toxicity," and ask your vet about substituting Tylan. Good luck.

The Vet info website says to use 1 TB of food grade DE every day for 90 days (for dogs 55 pounds and over), then one TB every third day for continuing protection. So far, we've used it for about 45 days--maybe less. The heartworm preventatives my vet was prescribing to fight the hooks in my boy involved one dose every two weeks for 5 total treatments--the last dose supposed to be his regular monthly heartworm meds--so what my vet was prescribing was preventatives to protect for 90 days. I'll keep them on DE for the full 90 days. Then I'll do the every-third-day schedule. I'll continue their Interceptor on schedule for heartworm protection. But the Interceptor didn't prevent hooks on my girl (the boy might have brought hooks with him; the girl was fine and had a clear fecal exam a month before the boy got here), and the DE is cheaper than fecal exams and deworming--quite aside from the issue that the dogs feel better without the worms and we may be avoiding long-term intestinal problems if we keep the worms away. (And using it every third day will really be inexpensive.) The dogs don't seem to object to it (which is more than I can say about fish oil and the girl dog), so it's very easy to give.

Two weeks is the standard gap my vet operates on. (I've got a recent adoptee being treated for hooks, too.) What I have done--in addition to the vet's prescription--is use food grade diatomaceous earth (recommended by a friend who'd spent months treating her boy for hooks according to her vet's protocol). I started at 1 teaspoon a day for a week, just to see if anyone had a problem with it. (My boy appears to have shared the hooks with my girl, so I'm treating them both.) My two tolerated it well, and during that week I found a website that recommended 1 tablespoon a day for dogs over 55 pounds, for the first 90 days; then a tablespoon every third day. The reason I went with the diatomaceous earth is that I know hookworm infestations can be hard to kick, and false negative fecal exams are common. The treatment my vet was recommending was going to take two months--if it actually was successful--and I wanted something that would help sooner. No one in this house was enjoying mountains of soft, stinky, yellowish poop. (Really. Both dogs.) Noticeable improvement within two weeks. I sprinkle a tablespoon on each dog's kibble, then add water and stir. (You don't want the dog to inhale it, so wetting it down or mixing it with wet food seemed like a good idea.) The dogs seem to like it. We're six weeks in, and the boy's poops are about half the size they used to be, they're dark and firm, and--yes--praising poop feels strange. (The girl got back to better than before even faster than the boy.) In the meantime, we've used the meds my vet prescribed as well. But my vet uses alternating doses of two heartworm preventives--your regular med, something else two weeks later, then your regular med again after two weeks, and the alternative med after two weeks, and you wind up back on your regular meds after the next two weeks. But my guys were taking Interceptor on time, without fail, and the healthy girl got sick (the boy probably came in with the hooks, but she wasn't sick until she'd spent six weeks in the same household as him), so I had less faith in Interceptor as one of the two meds my vet prescribed. At any rate, we had an improvement at the end of the first two weeks (on Interceptor), before we started two weeks on the other med. Food grade diatomaceous earth is not expensive. I think places like hardware stores carry it (it's used in pool filters), but I ordered it from Amazon. It also has uses as a pest preventative even beyond being taken internally.

When Silver was in heat and I had to use the diaper cover with a pad, she didn't mind it--and that was three long weeks. But in the mornings, I'd be groggy when I took her out to pee. I'd stand there with her and Sam, and she'd just look at me. "Come on, Silver. We haven't got all day." She'd tilt her head and look at me as if making up her mind...and then pee, still wearing the diaper cover I'd forgotten to remove. Thank heavens they came 2 to a package.

Metronidazole toxicity tends to look like stroke symptoms: falling down, head tilt, staggering, etc. There's a video here: http://vetgirlontherun.com/metronidazole-toxicity-vetgirl-veterinary-ce-video-blog/

A dropped gracilis muscle. There should be some posts in the archives here on Greytalk, but you can also find articles here: https://www.google.com/?ion=1&espv=2#q=dropped%20gracilis%20muscle%20greyhound