It’s been a very busy month.  It’s also been a dreary, snowy 30 days.  I believe we have seen sunshine just twice in that time, and even then it was just for a few minutes.  We did finally get a few hiking videos out, but nothing that I felt required more detail in a post here.  So I haven’t posted here in quite a while.  Sorry for my absence.

And now of course, I have news that isn’t so good.  We went on hikes last Saturday and Sunday, and those videos are up on YouTube.  And you can see the boys are looking in good shape and having a great time.  But Monday when I let Caesar out for his morning “walk about”, he seemed a bit wobbly.  I just figured he must be tired from all the hiking.  But when I came home from work at 5 o’clock Monday.  He was so wobbly he couldn’t stand up for more than a few steps.  And he seemed to be quite uncomfortable for one reason or another.  So I gave him some pain pills and he got a nice hot bath to sooth his itchy skin.  And he was still pretty wobbly the rest of the night, but through determination he did climb the stairs and got around the house to do his business without too much trouble.  But the next morning his trip down the stairs was kind of a controlled crash. He had me seriously worried.

So the next morning I made an appointment to see the vet and we gave him a pretty good going over but could not pinpoint any realistic diagnosis.  At the vet he seemed happy  (there were loose cats there)  and pain-free, but he had obvious neurological deficits.  The vet said she thought it looked like it was degenerative myelopathy, however it doesn’t usually come on that fast.  So, other options were a spinal tumor, a fractured vertebrae, or a spinal meningitis.  None of which are very good diagnoses as far as  the prognoses goes.  Another confusing factor is that he did not seem to be in pain, and he had no problem with a lot of manipulation of his back and legs.  That would’ve seemed to eliminate the fractured vertebrae or spinal tumor.  However, unlike Caesar’s normal friendly personality he snapped at the vet.  Now out of the three vets in this practice, this one seems a little shy of German Shepherds.  And he senses that.  We only get this vet about every fifth time we go to the vet and each time she wants to put a muzzle on him.  So this time because he snapped., we did muzzle him, but of course that changes his reaction to pain and manipulation.  So I think that might have been a mistake.

But anyways, after $180 visit with the vet we really had no answers and no plan.  It was stuck in my mind that I was going to lose him within the next week or two because of how fast this came on and how serious it seems to have put him down.  We had to buy more tissues !! But over the next two days Caesar showed his mettle and was determined to be fairly normal, just sitting a lot after every three or four steps and then dragging himself back up.  It’s fairly painful to watch, and I can tell it’s frustrating to him, but it’s what we are working with at the moment.

Now I’m not a cold-hearted person, but I paid $600 for Caesar nine years ago.  And with some very good luck he would be expected to live another three years.  But, if he is crippled or paralyzed on his rear end, his life expectancy is pretty short.  So when the vet says that we could do MRIs, x-rays,  Spinal Taps, blood work, and surgery totaling up to around $5000 my head explodes and says no way.  So we did take blood just to see if there was any infection or systemic issues that could be treated with medication.  But of course his blood markers are all perfect.  He’s an extremely healthy dog, with an extremely weak rear end and no coordination, that suddenly came on in just a few hours.  So our next move is going to be to try x-rays and see where that might take us.  They have offered  to save me some cost by doing the x-rays with him awake.  Not under anesthesia.  That saves about $300.  However it will be interesting to see if they will be successful in doing that because they won’t let me in the x-ray room and in a stressful situation Caesar may not be very cooperative.  I will have to get the vet tech quickly trained in how to control Caesar with commands he understands.  So right now, that is where we stand.

I will put another post up on Wednesday (2/15/17) about how the x-rays came out and how he’s doing.  I threw away $300 on a go-cart (wheelchair) for him so that he can get around better if he wants to.  I don’t know how well he will take to being strapped into the harness that will allow him to wheel around, or how it will work in the 8 inches of snow we have.  But perhaps it will stop him from splaying out on the floor in the house anyways.  It’ll just be a challenge to keep him away from the stairs.

Stay tuned, more to come!