The Five Dog Blog: Living Life Simply Messy: The Medical Roller Coaster of Life...Starring Bourbon, Monday and Rookie!

I think August is going to be a weird month, here we are 5 days into it and already I am wore out!

Poor Bourbon isn't feeling real well, we are crossing our fingers it's an easy fix but nothing that concerns our dogs is ever easy :). Over the past month, Bourbon has started two fights - one with Monday and one with Rookie. Both fights resulted in superficial wounds on the other dogs and relatively little damage to Bourbon. But this behavior is very uncharacteristic of Bourbon so we got a little worried.

I took Bourbon in to the vet to get his blood drawn the day after the last fight. He just hadn't been himself - he was very mopey and tired and just overall cranky - and so I had feeling there something medical going on. Plus, he's 9 so now I'm sure the health problems will start piling on :(. And surprise surprise, we got his blood work back and he is SUPER low thryoid. Like severely low because my dogs don't do anything half way - it's go big or go home at our house! Low thyroid (t4) for dogs is 1.2 and guess what Bourbon's value was.... 0.2. Practically nonexistent :(.

So we have two issues that we are possibly looking at: hypothyroidism or some kind cancer/disease/illness that is causing low thyroid. The rest of his blood work was great. So we are going to start a low dose of thryoid supplementation and see if he starts feeling better. We'll retest him in a month and hopefully our issue will be solved (if only it is that easy!!!).

So while we were worrying over Bourbon and managing our household to make sure he is kept separate most of the time so nobody annoys him, Monday decided she needed some attention as well. Yesterday, I had her babygated in the living room while I was gone with Rookie to the vet (more on that below) and when I got back she had eaten part of a towel that we were using as a rug at the front door. Really, Monday?!?! Ugh, she seems to do this once a year and I have no idea what triggers it. So off to our vet clinic we went to get her to puke. She puked up three times, each with copious amounts of towel in them. So here's hoping we got it all. Needless to say, she's eating some canned food for the next few days in case she needs to puke more (raw food coming back up is the NASTIEST thing in this world, seriously).

This was a full size bath towel...

And while Bourbon is cranky and Monday is trying to die, Rookie had to go in for a recheck on his demodex. We are still doing the Ivermectin but he is no longer on Cephalexin. Sadly, Dr. Noxon still found mites (and some mite families!) on him so we are continuing the Ivermectin for another two months and then will do another recheck. I think Rookie will be on Ivermectin for about year...but on the bright side - he'll never have heartworms lol! :)