I want to take a minute to mourn/vent. Forgive me if its something too personal.
This last weekend has come straight from the devils asshole..... and its not been pleasant. It started Thursday morning. My wife made the comment that our border collie was not acting right. She'd gotten up in the middle of the night and he looked as if he was dead. He didnt' wake up when she said his name (normally, he would have met her at the bed and walked her to the bathroom). He just seemed out of it. She was at home most of the morning and afternoon on Friday. She said he seemed to have these episodes of "phasing out". She did a physical, but couldnt find anythign wrong other than he wasn't acting right.
I got home from work about 7:30 pm. When I got home, he was laying on the floor, but looked as if something really bad was wrong. I don't know how to describe it, he just was not right at all. I did a brief physical exam, when I listened to his heart, I heard about a 30 second run of premature ventricular beats--this is a serious medical condition that can result in death because the heart doesn't fill with blood the way its supposed to before beating, so in essense blood can't circulate the way it has to to maintain life. So I loaded him up and took him to the teaching hospital where my wife was working for a general workup. We took chest rads using my equine machine---and didnt' see much wrong, but they weren't the best films. Blood work was normal, except his lactate was abnormal. He seemed normal, but not right through all of this--he is a veterinarians dog, so he's had too many rads to count taken along with blood drawn. Then he had an episode where he more or less collapsed.
We took him into the small animal ICU, where when we hooked him up to the ECG, his heart rate was over 220 and he had a continuous run of VPCs. We repeated the chest films using the small animal machine. The only thing wrong was his heart appeared more globoid than it should. We did a brief echocardiograph on his heart, where we discovered some fluid around the heart---whcih was enough to cause the increased heart rate and maybe the VPC's. We decided to let the emergency specialist tap the fluid from around his heart, which went off without a hitch and he seemed to immediately get better----except for the fact that the fluid removed appeared to be blood, not fluid like we expected. Over the course of the next hour, his heartrate again climbed and he started having a very hard time breathing. He also started throwing long lines of VPCs. We decided to again tap the pericardium (the fibrous tissue surrounding the heart), but this time we removed over 300 ml of blood--it appeared as if he was hemorrhaging around his heart into the sac surrounding the heart and it was looking lik we could do nothing to stop that bleeding.
We administered a blood transfusion, gave medication to promote fibrin clot formation, gave pain meds, and started to pray hard. We repeated the echo 45 minutes later and his heart looked as if we'd not removed any fluid at all from around it. It times like this that my wife and I get really frustrated---we had a team of 4 boarded veterinary specialists from different specialties (including my wife who is boarded and nearly boards eligible in a second discipline), myself (I'm not boarded, but I'm boards eligable in two disciplines, working on the third), and the same number of residents and interns training to be specialists in probably the best hospital in the state and access to some of the top specialists in the world all a telephone call away and all willing to do whatever it takes to save this dogs life---and the knowledge that no matter what we do, he's going to die. So we took him home. He died on his favorite bed in my wifes arms at about 4:30 AM Saturday morning.
I spent Sunday cleaning the crematorium out---we'd last cremated several wildlife and I hadn't cleaned the crematorium. I then got the great joy of cremating my wifes best friend and cleaning out the ashes by hand with a small scoop Sunday afternoon.
this weekend sucked....
