Baby E's week 9 photoshoot
My SCH is pretty much non-existent and my blood work came back good. So good that my nurse thought it was time to start weening me off my drugs. (A patient is weened off drugs slowly right around the time the placenta starts taking over as the drugs that they were on support the pregnancy. Once the placenta takes over it'll replace the hormones the patient is on.) So, I went from 2 estrogen patches every other day to 1 patch every other day to none! We've cut back my progesterone shots from 1.5mL to 1.0mL daily. Those are the only 2 drugs they've altered, but I'll take it!
My symptoms are pretty blah. I had some nausea in the beginning, which is gone. Other than being tired, hungry, and having an inconsistent BM schedule, life is good!
My family was up over Labor Day weekend and I attempted to go on a hike to one of my favorite spots with them, but I couldn't keep my HR below 140 bpm, despite my stopping/starting and going slowly. I know that they say that's for the average person, and as long as you can carry on a conversation while exercising you're good. Oh well, better safe than sorry after working for 3 years to get this baby.
Here's where our hearts and heads have really been for the last 2 weeks...
For those of you who are asking about Lakota. He's had a continued rough go. After, another trip into the vet because things weren't right (concluded his thyroid wasn't working hard enough, given new medication for that), a week of inconsistent eating, urinating, defecating, walking, etc, and one rough night of no sleeping I called the vet asking for another plan of action. I was told to come in, they had new drugs they wanted to try.
Sadly, the 'new' drugs were drugs he was already on. Ugh. So, after brainstorming with the vet he concluded that there was something going on/wrong with his GI. Story of this poor dog's life. I was given a new medication to help push any old food and gas through his system.
That weekend he started vomiting. At first is was bile, then it was brown, then blood....blood with blood clots. We rushed him in to the ER on Labor Day (for those of you who travel I-70 through the mountains on holidays, you know what traffic was like).
Once there the vet assessed him, decided she needed to do an x-ray and blood work to see if she could get any answers before more drastic measures needed to be taken. The x-ray didn't show much, but his blood work showed he was anemic and in kidney failure. She was concerned that it could be 3 different things; cancer, obstruction, or perforated ulcers.
The vet was pretty certain that whatever she was about to find wouldn't be good, and said that if it were her in the situation she would consider euthanasia. I asked if she thought Kot could make it through surgery/anesthesia, she gave him a 50/50 chance. 50% is better than we had at conceiving our own child.
We agreed to have him go into surgery to see if there was a 50% chance that we could save his life. She found one perforated ulcer in his stomach, which she took a culture of and sewed back shut. She then took a biopsy of a dark, thick spot on another part of his stomach. His abdomen was then flushed as the contents from him stomach leached into the cavity, causing an infection. After all was said and done, he still only had a 50/50 prognosis, but made it through surgery!
Lakota spent 2 days at the hospital recovering. Day 1 he wouldn't drink fluids or eat on his own, but his kidney values were almost back to normal. Day 2 he started drinking fluids on his own, but still wasn't eating. The vet decided to send him home that night to see if being in a more comfortable/familiar environment would encourage him to eat.
Lakota spent 2 days at home eating 1.5cof chicken and rice the first day, and 3 hot dogs the next. He still had no real appetite nor desire to get up and go outside to the bathroom. He spent 2 days laying around on puppy pads, constantly leaking urine with no real desire to go.
Needless to say when the vets called to check up on him, we were asked to bring him back in again. This time on the x-ray they noted how large his bladder was, the size of a basketball. After 2 hours and blood work it was decided to catheter him and drain his bladder since he wouldn't empty it himself. The vet compared it to a long car ride for us, when you've had to hold it for that long it's hard for the smooth muscles in the bladder to completely relax. Makes sense. Plus, they're thinking that the pain meds/anesthesia had a negative affect on his bladder.
After 20 minutes of laying on a table with a giant tube in his penis, Kot's bladder was finally empty. He even wagged his tail once he was back on all fours! Progress.
Here's to the next few weeks of recovery being smooth and stress free!
No comments:
Post a Comment