Wow! It's been a crazy last few days for me and the family. I usually don't have time to write on the weekends when the hubby is at home, and he had taken the 4th off, so that meant three days of him at home. This is not a bad thing, but I do try to spend it with him trying to get things done around the house.
Saturday started out with me taking my sidekick Toby to the vet. We usually schedule drop-off appointments, meaning that we drop them off around 7:30 a.m. and then they call us whenever they are done. This was just a routine wellness checkup, checking his overall health, and giving him a couple of his vaccination boosters. Around 10:00 we received a call from the vet telling us that Toby's lab test showed that he has elevated liver enzymes. It proceeded to tell me that they were up 100 counts from his last blood test and that he would need an ultrasound, and some types of medicine that I can't even begin to pronounce. Then in the next breath he tells me there is nothing to worry about, and we don't need to do the ultrasound at this point. Okay, so which is it? The kind doctor then told me that he would put the assistant on the line to go over things with me (i.e. money). So Terri gets on the line with me and gives me all the information she is supposed to give me and we are looking at a very large amount of money. Money that quite frankly we don't have at the moment. One of the reasons that I really like working with Terri is that she is honest. After she gave me the details for the liver enzymes, she told me that in all honesty it could be a false positive and that if it were her dog (she has a couple of them) she would probably wait until his next check-up and blood workup to see if they stay the same or if the count continues to climb. So in 30 days, we will do more blood work on Toby and see where we stand with the liver enzymes. So we made the decision to wait until his follow-up blood work to see how we are going to deal with this.
After the discussion on the liver enzymes, Terri informed me that Toby's ear was infected again. This is something that has been a continuous battle since he was about 1 year old. We have used every antibiotic they have for this, so now we are starting at the beginning of the medicine list again to see if it will work. It's kind of like with humans. If we take Amoxicillin every time we get a bacterial infection, then eventually are body becomes resistant to Amoxicillin and they have to put us on a different antibiotic. Of course the vet wants to do x-rays and test and possible surgery, but that will not be a guarantee that Toby will not lose his hearing in the infected ear. At the most, it will give him a year or two longer before going deaf in that ear. This is considered a pretty extensive surgery and even with my pet care plan, it would be a few thousand dollars. Once again, not money we have just laying around. One of Terri's dogs has the same thing and he is now 8 years old. She opted out of doing the surgery and not hearing out of one ear has not affected her dogs lifestyle or quality of life. It's not that we don't love our pets, because we do. They are members of our family and we want the best for them, but without taking out a loan, surgery is not something most of us can afford. So in the mean time we put Toby's drops in his ears every night, which is a complete battle as he is quite strong, and once a week we flush his ears with a special liquid which he really hates.
As I told Mr. Right, it's just like having a child. You don't know what the future holds as far as health issues. We fell in love with Toby from the time we first saw him at the Animal Control Center and he has such a great personality. I wouldn't abandon him just because he is not "perfect" anymore than I would if he were my child. I have a feeling that between my Crohn's and Toby's issues that he is having that I'm going to be spending a lot of time going to appointments for both of us in the future. Until tomorrow...
Many Blessings and remember LIVE, LAUGH and LOVE!
C
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