Hi everyone. I'm glad that I found this forum to share our stories and support each other. My name is Jonathan and I live in El Salvador, a small country in Central America (you know south of Mexico, neighbors with Guatemala and Honduras).
This is my story:
I have 2 poodles, one is a 11 year old male named Clean and the other is a 3 years old female named Mia. Mia will be 4 years old in september and has been recently diagnosed with Cushing. Mia always had thin hair since she was a puppy and she always was hyperactive, she panted more than normal and always seemed to be anxious, but aside from that she didn't have more Cushing symptoms, I don't know if she had the disease since she was a little puppy and it developed gradually. Mia and Clean had a litter of 3 puppies when she was 2 years old but she got spayed after that.
Earlier this year I noticed that Mia was drinking a lot more water than usual, she gained some weight, started peeing frequently and had a couple of indoor "accidents" and that caught my attention, she also had a few almost bald patches and couldn't jump into the bed and couches anymore, so I took her to the vet and they made a few generic tests and found normal sugar, hemoglobin and other blood levels so the vet said there were no abnormal signs and that the behaviour of Mia could be normal for spayed female dogs.
After that and in a matter of weeks Mia was hungrier than normal and she even ate things that were not normal for dogs to eat like mint candies and raw tomatoes, she developed a pot belly and a curved back and she lost more hair in her face and stomach, so I searched for those symptoms in the Internet and it was almost obvious that she had Cushing disease. I took her to another vet and told the new vet that I suspected it was Cushing, she said that it was a very rare disease especially in young dogs and that she never had a patient with Cushing that wasn't related to steroid drugs, so the vet made a lot of tests and ruled out diabetes, kidney failure and thyroid issues, the alcaline phosphatase and bilirubin were higher than normal though. After that they made an abdominal ultrasound and found that one of her adrenal glands was smaller than normal and the other one was bigger than normal although no tumors were evident and the other organs were normal. With those tests the vet diagnosed Cushing but unfortunately no labs in my country do the ACTH test for dogs, and we only did total cortisol in blood in a human lab that accepted the sample, indeed the cortisol was higher than normal but I understand it is not the right test.
Now that we are almost sure it is Cushing, we still don't know if it is pituitary or adrenal in origin and we don't have the technology to know it with certainty though we had started with the treatment, unfortunately in my country there is no Mitotane or Trilostane, so the vet prescribed ketoconazol, the first week 50 mg every 12 hours and now 100 mg every 12 hours. Mia has been 2 weeks now with ketoconazol but her symtomps have not improved yet. I will travel to Mexico in october and I can buy Vetoryl there, so meanwhile we will be using ketoconazol. I also bought lignans online as a complement to the treatment but I still have not received them.
I wanted to share this with you to know your opinions, do you think we have done the right decisions? any advice on the treatment and caring of Mia?