Monday, December 14, 2009
Solsey Baby
Sol has recovered wonderfully from her two cancer surgeries, but the one thing that has plagued her since day one is her cough. It seems we go through a lot of ups and downs where her cough isn't really that bad, to times when it is extremely chronic. Lately, has been an extremely chronic time.
We have been to see the vet a few times trying to do our best to manage what is going on. The verdict is that Sol has a partially collapsed trachea. There is nothing we can really do to fix it at this point either. She could have surgery, but the surgery has plenty of possible complications and at her age she is not an ideal candidate.
So we have been doing our best to manage it using a broncho-dialator. We started her out on an extremley low dose and had only mild success. So we increased her dose and have seen some improvements. The one side effect of the broncho-dialator is that is can cause "jitterness". In Sol's case, when using the new dose, it caused her to stare into space. A lot of times, she is panting while she is day dreaming. Frequently, she is laying on her half of my pillow panting in my hear and staring at the back of my head for hours on end during the night. Which, needless to say, does not make for a very restful night sleep for either one of us.
We gave the new meds a fair chance to see how well they would work before we determined that their effect on Sol's cough did not outweigh the staring side effects. We headed back to the vet to figure out what do do next and decided that we would spread her medicine out during the day. Instead of giving her the medicine two times a day, we changed it to four and cut the dose in half. At the end of the day, she still got the same amount of medicine, but it was just spread out during the day. It is times like these that I am really glad that I work from home so that I can be here to giver Sol her meds during all hours of the day.
Spreading the meds out over the course of the day helped with the staring problem and had about the same effect on Sol's cough as before. However, Sol was still coughing an awful lot so we returned to the vet. This time, we tried a mild steroid to see if this had any effect. Well, we got all the side effects of the steroid without any improvement in Sol's cough. Sol became one insatiable little puggy and would wake up at all hours of the night and whine for food. As soon as we could, we weened her off the steroid. Again, we found ourselves back to square one and back at the vet's office.
Last Friday, we had another chest x-ray done just to make sure Sol's airways looked OK. The vet noticed a tiny bit of congestion, so we will be trying out a diuretic for the next week. That will be fun because it will make Sol have to go potty frequently. Again, another instance where working from home is priceless.
In addition to the the diuretic, Sol is back on a cough suppressant. The cough suppressant worked very well for her back in September when her surgery needed to be cancelled due to her cough. I am hoping it works as well this time around too.
All in all, Sol seems to be taking it very well. She went to the dog park again this weekend and had a great time. It is very odd, but she doesn't cough at the dog park. No one can really explain why because she normally coughs more when she is excited.
Hopefully, the diuretic will clear up the congestion and we can get to a point where her cough isn't too bad again.
I hope the new meds and 
julie
12/14/2009
I hope the new meds and the new way of treatment will help her poor babe as we love sol so much here she is so precious and i enjoy starting my day with her.Get well sweet sol as you are in our hearts and thoughts.