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Pets

Charley Back Home

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Charley & Ruby in better days

Charley seemed a little better last night, but he was drugged to the teeth with steroids and tranquilizers and more stuff than the human mind can conceive. M’hijito had to build a spreadsheet to keep track of the dosing!

I wouldn’t have believed it…that a dog could silently work itself into such a nervous state that it can give itself a freaking heatstroke…except that before we even got to the freeway on-ramp he was doing the same thing my son described: pressed himself tight against the door, panting frantically, huffing & puffing like a steam engine. This was in spite of being doped up on sedatives! And in spite of M’hijito sitting in the back seat holding him and trying to calm him.

The freeway is within easy walking distance of the fancy emergency veterinary — less than a quarter mile, I’d say — and we were in my car, not my son’s. So presumably the cause is not some strange ultrasonic noise inaudible to humans…unless all newer cars with backup imaging technology do that. I did call Chuck the Wonder-Mechanic last week and asked if there was any way the back end of the vehicle could have heated up despite the AC blasting away…he doubted it. Pete, his business partner and future Heir to the Empire, said he hadn’t heard of any such high- or low-pitched noise issues in late-model Fords, though it was the first thing that jumped to IT Dude’s mind when I told him the story. Pete suggested I get in touch with Ford…good luck with that! 😀

At any rate, if that were the case, I’m sure the word would be out by now. There’s not a credible sign of it on the Web, at least not that I can see.

It was about a 15- or 20-minute drive to my son’s house. By the time we got there, he was already heating up, even though we cranked the AC as cold as it would go. They’d shaved his belly, so you could feel the skin on there: HOT. Schnozz: HOT.

But he now can walk about 20 or 30 feet, so that’s better than it was. We got him in the house. He gulped down about a gallon of water…you have to hold the water bowl up to his head, because he can’t bend his head down and drink.

Got him flopped down on the cool tiles and put an ice pack between his rear legs, as we’d seen the veterinary staff do. I saturated the fur around his head and neck with water, as I’ve been taught to do in the past to cool off an overheated dog. He soon stopped panting, and eventually he fell asleep.

My son’s employer kindly agreed to let him work from home, and provided a company computer and remote connection to the corporate system. In theory, that’s not part of his job description, but it looks like they’re willing to let him do it for a few days.

The Fancy Vet said to take him to the regular vet in four or five days to have him re-assessed. So if they’ll let him work from home today and tomorrow and a couple days next week, that should simplify life some.

Meanwhile, it looks like the hypothesis that the dog hurt his back or neck when he fell out of the car in Show Low may hold a little water. The veterinary assistant said when they would rub him along one side of his spine, he would act like it was sensitive, and when they lifted his right front leg to bandage the macerated spot where IV after IV has been stuck in, he yelped like it hurt. They did X-ray his spine and couldn’t find any broken vertebrae, so if this theory is right, he must have twisted or fallen cattywampus when he fell on the ground, thereby spavining his back. In that case, in a week or three, he may recover his ability to walk.

Whatever becomes of him, obviously he never can ride in a car again. Which is a bit of a problem. Presumably the only way my son will be able to get him to the vet will be to dope him with Benadryl or a sedative.

So in an idle moment, I googled “dog fear of riding in car,” and the search conveniently suggested an alternative search term: “dog is suddenly afraid to ride in the car.” Following that, I discovered that this is not a rare problem: all sorts of sites and discussion boards describe mature dogs that previously had no problem riding in a car suddenly evincing utter terror.

What would bring this on is a mystery. My son has never been in a car accident; the dog has never been hurt or tossed around by a sudden stop. Apparently out of the blue Charley just decided that cars are bad for Charleys.

It is beyond weird.

To say nothing of beyond expensive. My son refuses to say what he’s spent so far, but I’d guess it’s probably $5,000 to $8,000…possibly as much as $10,000. He said he’d just paid off the car (a 0 percent loan!) because he so much hates being in debt. And now he’s in hock to the credit card companies

Our Story So Far…

Day One
Update
Homeward Bound
Back in Town

A-n-n-d… The Dog Situation

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So we schlepped the dog to the vet at 40th St. and Thunderbird. The dog is crippled: he can barely stand up; he can walk a few steps and then collapses.

Vet did some tests and thinks the dog is probably not bleeding on the inside, but he can’t explain the crippled state. Show Low vet has diagnosed this as neurological damage from the 107.4-degree temperature. He speculated that the dog will never get over it.

Our vet now suggests we schlep the dog to a high-powered 24-hour veterinary center staffed with specialists up on Cave Creek Road. He arranges for us to arrive, and we start driving.

They do an ultrasound of Charley’s abdominal cavity and conclude that, contrary to fears, there’s no internal bleeding. At various veterinarians’ behest, we leave the dog overnight at the Cave Creek doggy hospital.

I am skeptical.

The dog is eating and defecating normally. The dog is drinking plenty of water and peeing normally.

What has happened here is that when Ian opened the car door to let Charley stretch his legs in Show Low, Charley fell out of the car. At that point he could not walk. Ian thought that Charley couldn’t get up because something was terribly wrong.

And something was: a 107.4-degree temperature is terribly wrong, indeed. As in potentially lethal.

However… What if…

What if the dog’s temp was elevated, as we have speculated, because he worked himself up into a doggy tizzy because he hates, hates, HATES M’hijito’s new(ish) Ford Escape? The specialist vet at the fancy emergency hospital stated that this was quite possible: dogs have been known to die from elevated temperatures caused by the whim-whams and the terrors.

What if the dog simply tumbled out of the car because he was huddled up against the door in dismay (as he is said to have been) and when M’hijito opened the door he slipped and fell? In that case, he surely could have sprained (or broken) something in his back. Severe back pain plus several hours in a phobic state from riding in the car would absolutely explain the elevated temperature.

It also would explain why he gets incrementally better with each passing day. Hm.

The expensive vet did not see any damage to his spine, but I do not know if sonograms can detect fractures. What I do know is that people on Yelp comment on the breathtaking cost of this place — one person said they charged her twenty thousand dollars!!!

My son doesn’t have that kind of money: he’s already spent all of his emergency savings on this adventure.

Maybe I’m heartless…but I do hate to see him go into hock over a dog. Especially one that has about four years, maybe five, left in its life expectancy. Especially when in the back of my mind I suspect Charley would get better if simply left alone in familiar surroundings to rest and convalesce.

Granted, I’m not a nice lady. But I just don’t like the looks of this.

Dog and Human Heading Home…

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Charley in the mudOkay, so this morning my son arrived at the Show Low veterinary to discover the dog is much improved, but far from 100%. They’re releasing him to go home. As soon as M’hijito’s dad and NW (New Wife) show up, they’re heading back into town, and I gather he intends to try to get home without further incident and then tomorrow haul him to the vet, taking yet another day off work.

Here in town, my son was using the veterinary favored by NW, but the beloved vet there retired. I was SO totally not impressed with that outfit when I took Ruby there with a urinary tract infection…honest to God, the woo-woo holistic vet at Alta Vista did a better job with better results and infinitely better patient relations. There’s a veterinary at 7th Street and Maryland where I used to take Anna the German Shepherd. Although they’re part of one of those damn chains that try to bamboozle you into signing up for endless unnecessary exams and needless treatments, nevertheless the vet herself seemed to be very good and pretty sensible.

Meanwhile, the dog is still unable to walk normally. The vet up there thinks it’s neurological damage and may never entirely go away. However, if you assume he did not suffer either from heat exhaustion or nervous prostration but instead had a vestibular stroke (not uncommon in dogs), some websites say the gimpiness will clear up in a few weeks.

IMHO, though, the first order of business needs to be to find out what really happened to the dog. We know he didn’t get a fever of 107 degrees(!) from being left in a hot car and probably not even from sun shining in on him (the windows have dark tinting, and the air conditioning is highly efficient). So the possibilities are…

  • He worked himself into such a frenzy that he suffered an episode of psychogenic hyperthermia.
  • He had an infection or heartworm which led to an extremely elevated temperature.
  • He had a stroke (which probably would not have resulted in a 107-degree internal temperature, but who knows?)
  • He had a heart attack (which some sites suggest might elevate body temperature).
  • Some other factor is at work.

This looks bloody expensive, if you ask me…

Doggie Update

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So Charley the Golden Retriever is still alive. And I had the locale wrong, for reasons attributable only to senility: somewhere along the line “Show Low,” the garden spot where M’hijito and his dog are presently becalmed, morphed in my aged mind into “Snowflake,” a different  wide spot in the Arizona road. Show Low is even further from lovely uptown Phoenix: it’s about a five-hour drive. Images all seem to be copyrighted, but you might enjoy this rustic piece of public relations…

Nice and cool up there, though. It’s hot, humid, and rainy down here.

The vet’s office in exquisite Show Low is closed on the weekend, but they’re kindly letting M’hijito visit his dog while staff go in to check on the imprisoned livestock. They also hope to get a vet in to talk with him this afternoon, maybe.

Charley lives, to the surprise of all concerned. The vet expected him to die and prepared M’hijito (repeatedly) for that eventuality. Apparently he’s stronger this morning and able to sit up (which was not so before this). However, his bloodwork still ain’t great: they’re telling M’hijito that the platelet count is low.

However, he had a bowel movement that was not bloody diarrhea — which would have been the case had the predicted devastation to his intestines occurred. I have not heard that he’s bleeding from the nose, gums, or anus, which would be the case if the low platelet count indicated internal hemorrhaging. There’s some indication of harm to the liver, but the vet says a dog may recover from some injury to the liver.

The vet would like M’hijito to take Charley to a 24-hour veterinary facility. Here in the Valley, these places are billed as “emergency animal clinics,” and they charge $1300 (!!!!) just to walk in the door. Got that? It’s just the down payment. If you say “we can’t afford that,” they will summarily turn you away! Customers either love them or hate them: some people report good experiences, but evidently if you’re unfortunate enough to have a bad experience, it’s very, very bad.

At any rate, it’s unclear that the dog needs that kind of high-powered treatment: he hasn’t died yet under the care of the small-town vet, and my guess is that if he hasn’t died yet, he’s not going to.

M’hijito says tomorrow morning he will call his vet’s office (she actually retired, but at least he’s on record as having been a customer there) and follow their advice, although clearly his inclination is to take the dog to a 24-hour place.

Meanwhile, as reported yesterday, one researcher found that all the hyperthermic dogs in a study survived if they made it through 72 hours in a veterinary hospital.

Additionally both hypothermia (getting too cold) and hyperthermia (getting too hot) can on their own cause platelets to die off. In vitro (i.e., in glass: in a lab), they readily regenerate at room temperature. This suggests that if the dog actually is not hemorrhaging internally, his blood count should recover in due time. If he were bleeding much internally, he would not appear to be getting steadily better, a little each day. Presumably, he would not even be living at this point.

And I also learned that, at least in humans, hyperthermia can be psychogenic — that is, stress can bring it on.

A more technically inclined report says that in humans stress can lead to transient hyperthermia, which will not respond to aspirin (and similar drugs used to treat fever) but which may respond to sedatives and antipsychotics.

As far back as 2008, researchers were talking about stress-induced hyperthermia — the vets up there should know about this, you’d think.  Presumably, though, because they’re in a rural practice they have no need to.

My son says the dog was never exposed to high temperatures en route, not even when they were stalled for an hour by the road construction in the Salt River Canyon. In fact, he says, the inside of the car was “cold as an icebox.” He let Charley out of the car while they were stopped, to let him walk around…and noticed then that he was panting and wild-eyed. This he attributed to the dog’s usual dislike of riding in the car. For unknown reasons, Charley was OK with the decrepit Honda sedan M’hijito used to drive, but he hates loathes and despises the Ford Escape that took its place. Under normal circumstances he freezes up and goes all rigid, M’hijito says, and sharing the back of the vehicle with camping gear evidently got him massively overwrought. M’hijito thinks he became so frantic in his fear or phobia or whatever the eff that he worked himself up into overheating. That possibility seems to be confirmed by the studies above.

Less evident is whether it’s really necessary to consign this dog to a 24-hour emergency veterinary once he’s well enough to travel five hours inside the hated vehicle, or one like it. These places are renowned for bills that run well over $1,000, and one person reported a bill of $22,000. It’s hard to get a straight story, unfortunately, because most of the sites discussing this subject bear all the hallmarks of paid posts, at one point or another coming around to a pitch for pet health insurance.

Herein lies the problem, my friends, with raising children in an upscale urban setting. Well. One of the many problems.

In a setting where dogs and cats are “members of the family” and animal owners go around calling themselves “pet parents” (for godsake), it’s impossible — it surely is socially unacceptable and it probably is objectively impossible — to communicate to a young person the ethos that a dog is a dog.

It is not your friend and it is not your “packmate” and it is not your baby: it’s a dog.

A symbiote.

It cannot understand why it’s suffering, and its concept of the future does not include “someday maybe I’ll recover and sure, I’ll be a cripple but that will be OK because I’ll still live to see my grandpuppies graduate from Harvard.”

So moderns like M’hijito whose parents did not grow up in rural settings aren’t prepared to deal with the eventuality of putting an animal down as the kindest thing for all concerned.

You know, my father grew up as a cow-puncher and my mother’s family scratched a living out of a dirt farm in upstate New York. Neither one of them would have wanted to put a pet down. But neither of them would have impoverished themselves to keep a seriously injured or sick dog alive, or forced that animal to live through a lot of suffering on a long-shot chance that it might survive.

Nor, I might add, would my father have put up with a supposed hunting dog that was so neurotic you couldn’t take it for a four-hour ride in a car without it collapsing in a phobia-induced state of hyperthermia.

This is my fault. I should have made my son understand that a dog is a dog, not a four-legged person…I mean, understand that on a gut level.

My own sense is that one should do what one can, within reason (got that? within reason is the operative term here) and then let nature take its course.

Our ranch manager once told me that. I asked him if we shouldn’t call in a vet for a very aged horse that was suffering an ailment. He said, “No, we should let nature take its course.” And he was right. I would have called the vet; still would, being a city girl. Nothing much would have happened. The vet would have charged more than the horse was worth; the horse would still have died. But I wouldn’t have felt guilty about it, anyway. I guess.

About eight times out of ten, I expect, letting nature take its course is the most merciful thing for all of us. All told.

Beside Myself…

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CharleyM’hijito is stuck in Show Low, and Charley the Golden Retriever is dying. He may already be dead as I write this. My son is beside himself with agony and I’m beside myself with sorrow and worry for him.

He drove up to the high country, taking the dog with him, to go camping and fishing on the Rez. At Show Low a wide spot in the road north of Payson, he stopped to take a rest and let Charley stretch his legs. When he got him out of the car, Charley tumbled out onto the ground and he discovered the dog couldn’t walk or even stand.

Charley hates riding in the back of M’hijito’s new car. He didn’t like riding in the old car, which was a sedan, but for reasons no one has been able to figure out, he simply loathes the Ford Escape, and he gets stressed whenever he’s made to ride any distance in it. M’hijito thought his panting and carrying on was a manifestation of the usual stress, and when he saw the state the dog was in, he thought Charley was having a stress attack.

He called me on his cell. I advised him to take the dog to a vet and looked up the main vet in Show Low, who has a 4.5-star consumer rating, interestingly enough. He rushed the dog over there, where he was told the problem was heat prostration.

The dog’s temperature was 107 degrees!

As they were trying to cool Charley off, they were blaming my son — the vet evidently thought he’d left the dog locked in the car and gone off.

That is absurd. My son dotes on that dog and would never do any such thing. Charley was in the back of an SUV with the air-conditioning going the whole time. I called Chuck the Wonder-Mechanic and asked if it was possible that the back of a Ford Escape could get hot enough to harm an animal if the vents in back were nonfunctional. He said he didn’t think so: because the front seats are separate, like captain’s chairs, enough cool air from the front vents would blow between and under the seats  to keep the dog from overheating.

At any rate, now M’hijito blames himself.

The vet said Charley would probably not live until this morning, but if he does live until today, he will probably die in agony sometime during the day. In that case, he suggested, it was best to put the dog down.

I’m quite sure my son would never have left that dog in a hot car: that would be utterly against his nature. And though I expect the back of an SUV could get warm, I’d be surprised if it would reach the level of “hot” — as in 107 degrees. Once you’re up the hill above Black Canyon City, the climate cools significantly, so even if the AC system were not working, if it was reasonably cool in front it shouldn’t have been dangerously hot in back.

A little research shows that dogs can suffer vestibular strokes or heart attacks, which would elicit symptoms similar to Charley’s…except for the 107-degree temperature. That says the animal was overheated and is definitely life-threatening. More research shows that about 50% of dogs afflicted with heat stroke survive, if they receive care soon enough. Of course, we don’t know how long Charley was in this condition: my son had been on the road four or five hours by the time he discovered it, and an hour of that time was spent stopped dead by road construction. Maybe the car could have heated up that much if it wasn’t moving forward — I understand the construction is in the Salt River Canyon, which would be a couple hours outside of Show Low.

And still more research reveals that the longer a dog stays in a veterinary hospital, the more likely it is to survive. Although…that’s deceptive.

One study of 42 dogs that presented with heatstroke found that patients that died from the condition did so within 24 hours after development of signs. Those that were able to survive longer than 48 hours lived.11 In the same study, all of the dogs that were hospitalized longer than 72 hours survived, despite evidence of multiorgan involvement.

The thing is…if most heat stroke victims die within the first day, then the ones who survive are more likely to live anyway. So to say that 100% of dogs hospitalized longer than 72 hours survive is only to say that dogs who manage to get through 72 hours alive are not going to die of the heat stroke.

The key to survival, though, is rapid treatment: cooling the dog’s body temperature back to normal as quickly as possible. But…if this happened to him while they were stuck in the construction mess, Charley would have been suffering that life-threatening elevated temperature for a two or more hours before M’hijto discovered it.

M’hijito wants to bring the dog back down into Phoenix today. But that will entail getting someone to help him. I offered to drive up there, but the thing is, if he’s going to be in the back of the vehicle tending to the dog, we would have one (1) driver to get two cars down the hill.

His friends are in Payson. He’s talked to them and apparently they’re willing to come meet him and help him get the dog back into the city. His father and the new wife have also said they’ll go up there.

However, given the business about the survival rate, I’ve suggested he should leave the dog there, without interrupting the IV and oxygen for an afternoon. He could drive down and pick me up, and we could then turn around and drive right back up the Rim. Today is Saturday: his vet will be closed by the time he can get back into town. So bringing Charley down today will mean risking his life further.

It’s a terrible situation.

Roadblock Man

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Dammit!  I thought he was gone! But ohhh no! This morning when the dogs and I took our usual route around the ’hood, there he was, in front of the cat brothers’ house, dumping cat food on the sidewalk.

We have this old guy who makes a hobby of driving around Richistan during the early morning hours and feeding the outdoor cats. He’ll dump a pile of cat food in the middle of the sidewalk and then stand around waiting for the neighbors’ stray cats to come over and let him pet them.

He also carries pocketsful of large-dog Milk Bones, which he likes to dispense to passing doggy-walkers.

On the surface, this is cute and sweetly eccentric. But when you give it even just a little thought: not so much.

Today’s encounter marked the second time he handed my dogs chunks of Milk Bones after I’ve asked him not to, and the second time it’s caused Ruby to choke and fly into a ten-minute fit of frantic gasping for air. She tries to swallow the whole damn thing without chewing it up, and of course she chokes on it.

Apparently he can’t or won’t remember not to fucking do that. It was the second time I’ve had to pick her up and run with a 25-pound animal in my arms and another one in tow on a leash, hoping I could get to the emergency vet before she died.

Exactly how I imagine I’m gonna get to the emergency vet through rush-hour traffic escapes me, but I’m willing to try.

Fortunately, she managed to gag the stuff up out of her throat by the time I reached Feeder Street NW, and once again she turned out to be OK.

But one of these times, she’s not gonna be OK.

And realistically, there’s no way I can get her to veterinary help at 6:30 or 7 in the morning.

What is the matter with people? Wouldn’t you think the sight of an elderly woman RUNNING down the street with a choking dog would be at least somewhat memorable?

I haven’t seen the old buzzard for a long time. So I imagined maybe he had fallen ill or died — he’s very elderly and seems somewhat frail. Lulled into a false sense of confidence, I’d taken to walking on that street again.

But no.

The real issue is that I haven’t felt very well myself for the past several months and so just haven’t been walking the dogs at all; or when I have, it’s been later in the day. Now that three-digit temps are here to stay, we need to be out of the house by 6 or 6:30, or else we ain’t a-goin’.

So I guess we’ve just been missing him: he’s been there; we haven’t.

Obviously, it’s my responsibility to tell some nutty animal-lover not to feed random stuff to my dogs. But…

In the first place, it feels rude to yelp at some poor old lonely guy, “Hey! Don’t do that!” Which is about what you’d have to do to stop him. He charges at you with both hands full of dog “treats” and shoves them into the animals’ mouths before you can say no. And in the second place, I have asked him not to feed those things to my dogs. He either doesn’t remember or just ignores me.

When you say to him “I’d rather you not feed those to the dogs” or “Please don’t give that to the dogs,” his response is “Oh, pooh pooh! It’s just a little Milk Bone.” He thinks they’re harmless.

And they probably are. Tales that Milk Bone is full of toxic carcinogenic chemicals, it develops, are folkloric: they’re just not true. On the other hand, they’re not full of anything that’s very good for your dog, either. Sort of like candy bars for humans: empty calories. They do contain some kind of beef product, though…and Ruby is allergic to beef in all its manifestations, even cow’s ears and leather chew sticks.

Ruby and Cassie get plenty of dog treats: pieces of carrot, pieces of apple, cubes of cheese, pieces of high-quality kibble. They don’t need any more empty calories than they already get.

So anyway. The guy poses a problem. What he really poses is a road block to my favorite garden spot to walk the dogs. I don’t take my dogs to the park because of the large number of dogs, some of them aggressive, running off the lead. So that leaves Richistan as the favored shady dell in which to stroll. To get in there, I’ll have to walk two blocks north and then drop south a block. In theory we could get there by taking the street one block to the north of the Cat Dudes’ house, but that street curves south and debouches back onto our usual street…about one lot east of Cat Dudes. To avoid him, we’ll have to go way out of our way, and also avoid the prettiest streets in that part of the neighborhood.

Pisseth me offeth…

Milk Bone Ingredients
Highlighted: Things you might prefer not to feed your dog

Wheat Flour, Wheat Bran, Beef Meal and Beef Bone Meal, Wheat Germ, Beef Fat (Preserved with Tocopherols), Poultry By-Product Meal, Lamb Meal, Salt, Chicken Meal, Dried Beet Pulp, Dicalcium Phosphate, Bacon Fat (preserved With BHT, Propyl-gallate, And Citric Acid), Brewers Dried Yeast, Whey, Artificial Color (Includes Red 40, Yellow 5, Blue 1), Vitamins (Choline Chloride, Dl-Alpha Tocopheryl Acetate [Vitamin E], Vitamin A Acetate, Calcium Pantothenate, Riboflavin, Vitamin B12 Supplement, D-Activated Animal Sterol [Source of Vitamin D3]), Malted Barley Flour, Iron Oxide, Casein, Natural Flavor (Source of Peanut Butter Flavor), Sodium Metabisulfite (Dough Conditioner), Minerals (Zinc Sulfate, Calcium Carbonate, Copper Sulfate, Ethylenediamine Dihydriodide [Source of Iodine]), Soy Lecithin