Wednesday, June 25, 2008

A bad month for a dog

Zena is having a bad month. To start with, a few weeks ago we awoke around 11pm to the sound of chewing and ripping. I stumbled into the room where she was supposed to be fast asleep in her crate. I caught her chewing on the sheet that was covering the pillow in her crate. She was literally eating it. I disciplined her and removed the sheet and went back to bed. A few minutes later she was chewing on her pillow. I once again disciplined her and removed the pillow. As I directed her back into her crate after removing the pillow I noticed she was acting funny. She seemed very agitated, she tried to lick anything she could including the air, and she was trying to eat whatever she could. She also felt really hot. I thought she needed to throw up, so I directed her outside. Outback she went nuts eating grass. I thought she had a tummy ache, and decided to let nature do it's thing and let her eat grass. BAD idea. Elisabeth recognized some of her symptoms... she then asked me to feel her stomach... it was REALLY round. Zena had bloat. We rushed her to the vet where they inserted a tube to get rid of the built up gas. For those of you who don't know, bloat is very dangerous. It kills animals, usually livestock and horses, and it's a very painful death. It occurs because the intestines spasm and the valves that usually allow gas to escape the stomach in the form of burping and farting (which Zena does a lot of usually) have shut down. So gas simply accumulates... it's like the worst cramps and gas pains you can imagine, followed by death an hour later. The vet was able to release the gas and I spent the rest of the night watching her, the recurrence rate for bloat in the next 7 days is really high apparently. Yay.
A few days later she developed allergies. Yes, that's right, my dog has allergies. She sneezed and shook her head a lot. So much so that we had to take her back to the vet thinking she might of had an ear infection. No ear infection, just allergies. Apparently this is also "dangerous"- if they continuously shake their head for an extended period, dogs can get a hematoma. So she got some allergy medication.
Moving onto a few days later, while walking her she tried to scratch the haltie around her nose and caught her upper eyebrow with her defore claw. She bled and of course, now has a scar on her eyebrow where hair used to be.
She also suffers chronically from alopecia X- which is a fancy way of saying she loses her hair for no good reason. This month, she is in her cycle of losing her hair. The vet thinks it's due to hormones. It started when she was fixed. And every few months she loses most of her hair and then grows it back. So she has some bald spots this month, and she has gone from all black to, some black, and some gray where she has lost most of her hair. She looks SO PATHETIC.
And yesterday... we let her out of her crate upon returning home from shopping to discover that she had hurt her tail somehow. She cried and whined like she was about to die for a little bit. Now her tail just won't stay straight. She is having problems keeping it up. She must have strained it, I don't think it's broken... but what do I know.








Notice the gray on the back of the legs in the first picture. That's where she loses her hair to start with. In the middle picture see her tail, which is in an arc pointing down. This is usually pointing up and going a mile a minute. The far right picture is of her eye. Notice the grey scar on her eyelid. We are just so glad she didn't get her eye.

-Josh

1 comment:

The Smiths said...

Poor Zena. Let's all keep our fingers crossed that things only better from here. Not sure they could get much worse. Poor thing!!