Hi all! I’m new here- and very glad to have found a forum to hopefully ease my worries/anxiety/general need to quit googling to the ends of the earth to help my sweet dog. Me, my husband, and his other 3 dog siblings just want him to get better. This is about to be a doosey of an introduction...
Eli is 6- he is a Rottie/Catahoula mix and quite the large dog he was 90lbs before all of these shenanigans started and is the sweetest normally full of energy dog.
It started around Aug 2019 when he became insatiably hungry and would walk around the house eating the other dogs’ food and licking everyone’s empty bowls. After about a whole month of it I finally said something is up and it isn’t getting better, I scheduled a vet appt. Interestingly enough the morning of his vet appt I wake up and he had peed in his sleep- which was a first. I take him in and tell the vet the symptoms- insatiable appetite, breathing heavy all of the time, just peed in his sleep.. you know the drill.
The vet wanted me to bring him back the next day to do the 8 hr LDDST test. So I take him ... that comes back and he says he more than likely has Cushings Disease and wants to do another test but at a higher dosage to narrow down if it is the adrenal or pituitary form... so I bring him back in two days for that. (This is early Oct 2019 by the way). In the meantime I realize that he has been drinking like a dolphin and just never noticed that symptom until then. After the next test the results come back that he more than likely has the pituitary form and the doc gives all of the options... which is essentially only Vetoryl. He then has me come back and pick up the prescription along with some dewormer because he had some hookworms too.
To recap- I took him to his first vet appt on a Friday and the following Friday I was picking up his Vetoryl for 120 mgs. I go home and give him his first dose. Wake up on Saturday and give him his second dosage. He seemed to not be drinking as much water but also not as interested in his food (it’s working I assume..) that day he seemed lethargic and stopped being himself. I wake up on Sunday and he’s super lethargic and isn’t interested in eating. I opt to not give him any more meds until I can solve what is going on. After googling quite a bit I go look around the backyard and find jet black poops. Given we have 4 dogs, that didn’t give me anything definitive to work with so I watch him like a hawk and start freaking out. He’s really just laying around and not moving much but I did get to see him poop and it was jet black and I began to internally freak out- it’s a Sunday the vet is closed, so I consider taking him to the ER but it I wasn’t quite there yet.. her was still moving some and the side effects mentioned lethargy.
Well Monday rolls around and he’s hardly moving- I call the vet and they say to take him straight to the ER.. so off I go. They run tests on him and throughout that day I find out that he has a stomach ulcer, pancreatitis, anemic and has lost a significant amount of blood and will need to stay overnight. They call that night to let me know they have to do a blood transfusion because his blood count was so low. Pretty sure my heart stopped that night.
After more days in the ER they say he can some home and I just watch him like a hawk. There’s no way for them to tell what caused all of that to happen. Did he eat something? I don’t know the dude wanted to eat everything the last month. Was it the Vetoryl? The vets aren’t sure but think it would be too soon for that given he only had two doses. No one has those answers.
All I can tell is that he came back verrry weak and needed to recover from being anemic and this terrible stomach ulcer had to heal and was down to 83lbs. During the next two weeks he got gradually better (from deaths doorstep) and some of the Cushings symptoms got worse. One being his muscles disappeared- and I mean overnight. He became skin and bones. They had him on blood thinners worried about his Cushings and anti stomach acidity Meds. About a week into the blood thinners his the water bowl showed blood in it and I noticed his nose was bleeding give he would also sneeze blood in the mornings (so we temporarily discontinued those meds) and come the 2 week mark I take him back to a check up. His blood count had gotten much better but now his blood pressure was showing high so they send me home with blood pressure meds and told me to come back in 4 weeks and then we would do more tests and consider restarting the Vetoryl at a lower dosage.
Well he came back from that day of tests and he seems to have gone a bit backwards and become lethargic so I watched him like a hawk. Also I went to my usual new best friend google to search for hours to try to solve all of my questions, concerns, and problems. In my googling became nervous to give him the blood pressure meds because of the side effects. My poor dog has been in such a fragile state since his near death experience I grow skeptic of anything and everything. Well I made the executive decision to just not give him those meds... this was the first time in a series of 5 recent visits that said high blood pressure, he hadn’t had high blood pressure in any of the other visits.
In the meantime Eli literally has lost all muscle mass it seems. He’s almost the size of a Great Dane and struggles to get his back legs stable to stand up by himself on the hardwood. He can manage to stand on other surfaces after a little persistence but most of the time we have to lift his back end up so he can stand. His fur isn’t growing back from where the ER had shaved spots and he has black bruising or pigmentation where the IV was. Poor guy looks sickly- his head is sunk in too. My next 4 weeks consisted of me scouring the internet trying to find some miracle. I came across the petwellbeing Adrenal Harmony Gold natural drops and after reading tons of reviews decided to give that a shot for two weeks. During those two weeks his water consumption seemed to go down, his breathing was more normal, maybe his hair started getting a little fuller (he never lost hair in his symptoms though just where the vet shaved).
Where I am now is that I skipped his 4 week checkup on Friday because he has been doing better and last time he got tests done he declined for a bit. I stopped the drops two days ago in preparation of trying Vetoryl again at a much lower dosage. Today we picked up the Vetoryl 30mg for him and I haven’t given it to him yet.
Where I really am now: I’m just lost. It’s November and in September I had a perfectly healthy energetic dog that just seemed to want to eat everything in sight. I’m nervous to put him back on Vetoryl because I have no idea what caused his ER episode. I want a magically muscle fairy to visit my sweet boy in the middle of the night and give him all of his muscles and strength back that evaporated into thin air.
I’ve googled and googled and haven’t known what to trust and found myself nose deep in a Canadian scholarly article sifting through the findings at 2am. I somehow just found this forum and am so glad to find actual people that aren’t giving a review on some products website.
I’m sorry again for the lengthy hello and background but I wanted to get it all out just in case someone has had a similar situation or has any advice.
-Jenni