I took Holly with me when I went out of town last Sunday and as usual she wouldn't eat her regular dog food so I was giving her scraps of whatever I was eating plus wrapping her antibiotics in lunch meat and by early Wednesday a.m. she was barfing all over the hotel room. We got home Wednesday mid-day and were both resting on my bed when I felt this thump--I thought the cat had jumped up on the bed so looked down and saw very quickly that he wasn't there but that Holly was laying very very very still. Like dead still. I just came unglued--she was totally unresponsive to my yelling and shaking and hysterical crying--her eyes were open, she didn't appear to be breathing and I was screaming her name and it was absolutely horrible. Then after what seemed like an eternity I saw her breathing shallowly and her eyes started to focus slightly. I bundled her up in a blanket--and then saw she'd peed the bed, the blanket and subsequently, me--and raced to the vet. By the time the vet saw her she was pretty much back to normal, but after doing some blood tests and eliminating a seizure from either low blood sugar (the vomiting) or pancreatitis, he figured she'd passed a blood clot due to the heartworms. He gave her a shot of heparin, told me to buy her some coated aspirin and suggested I stop the antibiotics since she'd stopped the coughing.
The next day she starts back to coughing so I restarted the pills. He wanted to see her last night so we went down there at 8pm (he'd been off that day but came in to see her--he's a super great vet BTW) and gave her a few EXTREMELY LOW DOSAGE dog equivalent of Oxycontin to help with the bronchitis pain and help keep her calm. My dog, the pill popper.
This heartworm thing is just scaring me to death. I kept screaming at her, "I'M NOT READY FOR YOU TO DIE, HOLLY!" but unfortunately that's just going to happen one of these days. The vet did say that dying from a blood clot isn't a bad way to go since you basically just boom, stop breathing.
Almost Thanksgiving!
3 weeks ago
