Hannah the Dog Health Update

In what is becoming a bit of a regular feature on this here weblog, let's discuss Hannah's health.

I'm going to start with the caveat that Hannah the Dog is a wonderful, sweet, smart girl. She's my best friend, we spend hours and hours together every day, and I love her with all my heart. I also know that we're doing the absolute best we can for her and we're providing her with the best care we possibly can and have no problem doing so.  But things aren't going as we had hoped they would.

Let's recap. We adopted Hannah in the summer of 2019.  I proceeded to write a post about her every month for the first year we had her.  From the very first month, she was a frequent flyer at the veterinarian's office. 

Quote from month one update: She's had worms, diarrhea, rashes, open sores from stress licking (from before we had her!), and has been on five different medications in the one month we've had her.

Quote from month four update: She started to get a rash on her chest and she had to go to the vet to get shaved and put on a super duper antihistamine named Apoquel. So now Hannah is on 3/4 of a tablet of Apoquel a day, her prescription dog food, and a probiotic.

Quote from month seven update: ....our puppy was really sick, with the grossest stuff every coming out of her every orifice. We got an emergency appointment with the vet and she was diagnosed with hookworms.  Getting her treated for worms has been a problem because so many of the preventative medications have proteins in them that we haven't tested her for. Hookworms are terrible to get rid of, by the way.

Quote from month ten update: Hannah was sick again, so we're back on diet trials...Our vet is sympathetic and has done tons of research, but all the blood tests come back normal, which is GOOD, but doesn't give us good guidance about what to do next.

Quote from one year update: She has been suffering from some unspecified pain and we've spent the last couple of weeks trying to figure out why she stopped jumping and now whimpers when she gets up from a sit or down position or climbs stairs.

Some of this stuff was pretty expected for a rescue dog - the worms, the anxiety, the scars from previous wounds that were probably untreated.  But some of it was not.  

So, there you have it. She's a dog who requires a VERY strict diet (her prescription kibble, chicken, eggs, pumpkin, sweet potato - that's it) or she gets sick.  She has environmental allergies that mean we have to be strict about bathing her to make sure she doesn't start to scratch or lick.  And that unspecified pain I wrote about a year in? We're STILL trying to figure that out. She has regular appointments with the neurologist and we thought we had solved it (we did an MRI and it looked like maybe she had a spinal infection), but she's been on antibiotics for six months and just last week had another flare up.

I just got off the phone with the vet and her discospondylosis is not responding to the antibiotics. The original sites show some healing, but still have active infection.  There's also a new site of infection.  It's mostly just luck that she hasn't had more flare-ups.  We need to treat her with a (very expensive) anti-fungal medication because maybe her infection wasn't a bacterial infection after all.  (We're keeping her on the antibiotic, too, because if it gets better we'll only have changed one variable - if you're keeping track, Hannah takes nine pills a day.) 

That also means she's back on minimal movement.  

It's exhausting, yo.  With the exception of Zelda the Cat's bladder stones, she has been a low-maintenance pet. This is not, I assure you, some sort of Munchausen by proxy situation wherein I try to earn favor from the vet by creating illnesses for the dog.  We wake up EVERY DAY with something new with her (today, for instance, she won't eat her breakfast and who knows what tomorrow will bring?) and despite all that we do for her every day, it seems as if she is in pain with some regularity. 

I love her and I want her to feel well every day. She's much too young to have veterinarian SPECIALISTS.  If you had told me, in the summer of 2019, that she would be so sick, I'm not sure that I would have agreed to adopting her, to be completely honest. But we did adopt her, we did take on that responsibility, and we can no longer imagine what life would be like without her, so we're doing everything we can to fight for her and make sure she has the best quality of life she possibly can. I hate that she's in pain so often and I hate that there's not much I can really do to ease that stress.

Have you ever had a high-maintenance pet? How did you handle all the stress?