Update from my post about Milo in the happiness thread; last update was
Bassist_Diver wrote:Deets:
The shelter thinks he's a black mouth cur and weimaraner mix. However, he's incredibly chill and relaxed and was when we met him in the shelter before he was neutered and on 72 hour pain meds.
He only weighs 38 lbs and is basically skin and bones, so we need to get him up to at least 45. Puppy food mixed with adult food, good times.
He's super shy and timid but an absolute sweetheart. He's also housebroken, so we're 99% sure he was abandoned by some fucking piece of shit scumbags. The shyness is obviously partly because it's new people and a new place, but if he was abandoned this will definitely contribute to this and distrusting most people.
Great around other dogs, CBFed about cats. Despite this, the resident cat is not amused by his addition.
Now for the bad news - in addition to being severely underweight, he has tapeworms, whipworms, and heart worms. The former two were easy to treat and have since passed. The HW, however, is treatable (they were recently discovered after being in the shelter for a month, so they're not dangerously developed yet) but rough. On Monday he starts 30 days of antibiotics (delayed thanks to the holidays), then after that he gets a spinal injection, has to be on crate rest for four weeks, get a second injection, and then a third the following day.
He's gonna have a very rough couple of months. But he's such a sweet, gentle dog that it'll all be worth it.
So last night we noticed he wasn't eating much and was very lethargic. At first we thought this was due to the pain meds they gave him. But then he started breathing very fast and shallow, had a lot of snot and other mucus oozing from his eyes and snout, and occasionally would have bouts of extremely heavy wheezing/difficulty breathing and then he would hack up a huge pile of mucus or some other thick fluid. We kept an eye on him all night but this morning he wasn't responding to us, wasn't eating, and wasn't drinking. Plus his breathing got faster, sounded watery, and he was wheezing a lot more. After two hours at the animal hospital he was found to have a fever, was two pounds LIGHTER (he was already very underweight), and diagnosed with aspiration pneumonia. For the unaware, it's a rare side effect of being put under anesthesia for any animal, including humans; basically you get some fluid from elsewhere in your body into your lungs while you're drugged up during a procedure. Nothing you can really do to prevent it and we're not blaming the shelter or vet team that neutered him.
The good news, though, is that 1. we caught it within 12 hours of it developing, so it didn't have a chance to spread and is isolated to only one part of one lung, it's 2. NOT a result of his heart worms, 3. NOT contagious, and 4. when they X-rayed him they also assessed his HW damage and found it to be extremely minimal, indicating this is a more recent development than the shelter thought and makes it all the more treatable. The bad news, however, is A. he needs to stay overnight in the hospital for IV antibiotics and fluids because of how malnourished/underweight he is (IV antis will act much harder and faster than orals and ebbs the severity of antibiotics'.... "dehydrating" effects), B. hospital stays are god damn expensive, and C. he'll need to wait another week or two before he can start on his HW treatment.
It was a very bittersweet Christmas morning - we're happy we were able to get him taken care of early and know this was the right thing, but we're still worried about him and miss having him around.
Also, I know this may be against the rules but fuck it - I have some pedals FS in the classifieds. I originally was moving them just to have the cash but now I need to sell them to help cover his hospital bill. I've dropped the prices a bit to sweeten the pot. I know y'all are all probably stretched with the holidays, but if there's anything you want or need please consider giving one of my toys a shot.