Amazingly, Anna H. Banana survived yesterday’s encounter with a vet who was searching for cancer. If she has cancer, it’s not easily detected. Nor does she have megaesophagus, the condition her previous vet speculated was the cause of the heavy breathing—her esophagus was clearly visible in the X-rays, and clearly quite normal.
What was detected, however, was extensive calcification in her spine. She has such severe arthritis that her spine is barely moveable. (Not news to any observer of her struggles to get down and back up.) The vet thinks the dog is in pain most of the time from that, which explains the pretty much constant huffing, puffing, and hyperventilating.
The plan is to treat her with Tramadol, a particularly effective painkiller that (according to the new vet) has virtually no side-effects in dogs. In humans, it has some wild ones: seizures, dizzy spells intense enough to cause falling, fainting, and uncontrollable shaking of an extremity. That’s why I don’t take it—my doctor prescribed it when I developed a life-threatening allergy to NSAIDs, but after getting a look at what it can do to you, I decided I’d have to be in outrageous pain to let that stuff pass my lips. The vet, though, insists that none of the above applies to canis lupus familiaris.
A hefty dose of this, I’m told, should cause her to snooze through the night. But I’m supposed to give her three hefty doses, one every eight hours. First dose came last night. It seems to have worked to keep her down all night…if not, I didn’t know about it, because at the same time I have her the dog pills, I dosed myself with two of Walgreen’s best knock-off Benadryloids, twice what I’d normally use as a sleeping pill. The burglars could have come in and set up a steel band, and not waked me up. One full night’s sleep—the first in about six weeks—-worked wonders on my own aches and pains: overnight the excruciating neck-ache and back-ache have almost disappeared.
Yesterday’s adventure set me back another $178, but at least we’re into another AMEX billing cycle. I had $50 left for the week, which ended yesterday. So I’m “only” $128 over budget at the end of this cycle’s first week.
Testing her for cancer and finding her (probably) free of it, however, allows us to test her for thyroid dysfunction (another hundred bucks), which I’m pretty sure she doesn’t have and probably has never had during the entire six years I’ve been dosing this animal with Soloxine and trotting her in twice a year for expensive bloodwork. There was no point in testing for a chronic, treatable illness if she had an untreatable disease that would carry her off.
If our theory is right—that the source of the dog’s pain is arthritis—and the Tramadol works on her, she should be in pretty darned good shape for an ancient dog. I hope so. With any luck at all, maybe Anna and The Beloved Ball will be around for a while longer.