Adverse Dog Vaccine Reaction – Elimination Issues Worsen
Lilly’s neurological deficits have grown significantly in the last 24 hours. I pretend we’re not headed back into life-threatening territory, but the worsening of Lilly’s elimination issues cause both worry and complication. I’m not sure I have the words to convey the heartbreak, so I won’t even try.
I’m sorry. It’s another blog post about peeing and pooping.
While I understand how Lilly’s renewed inability to walk could stem from her various neurological medications being out of balance, I’m less convinced that it could cause her sudden inability to “go potty” properly. Those issues seem much more in the something-broken or something-blocked category … because now she is struggling with both kinds of elimination.
Lilly seems to have forgotten how to go. She seems like she wants / needs to go, but then doesn’t / cannot. Over the weekend, it took a lot of cajoling, but eventually Lilly would pee. Now, she seems to have lost that ability as well.
As we mentioned Monday, Lilly will no longer poop on verbal cue. We have to trigger the reflex to get her to go. I guess I’ll have to figure out how to do the same thing to help her pee.
BUT, there are times when Lilly loses all control out of the blue and has both kinds of accidents in the house.
For example, Monday morning, Lilly soaked her “baby sofa” dog bed in my office. I was working away and noticed her licking her coat. I went to check — since Lilly is now also losing big chunks of hair for no apparent reason — and found both her and the dog bed completely soaked.
Dogs often lose control of elimination during a seizure, but I was right there with her, and I certainly didn’t see anything that looked like a seizure.
In response, I did three things:
- I threw the bed in the washing machine. (I’m glad I’ve kept the actual beds covered in a trash bag all this time, so I only had to wash the cover.)
- I took Lilly outside and gave her a quick bath with pitchers of water.
- I put a phone message into our veterinary neurologist. (As I write this, I have not heard back yet.)
Our late Dalmatian (Penelope Grace) had potty issues in her final year(s), so it isn’t like I haven’t dealt with this before. We called her our soggy-bottom girl. As her kidneys failed, and she could no longer walk easily, we were forever cleaning her and the dog beds up. Despite our best efforts, she often suffered urine burns on her skin because her urine was so concentrated from the kidney disease.
That said, this is still terribly upsetting.
We’re using a combination of puppy pee pads and modified diapers.
Lilly did have one NORMAL / long pee outside on her own after dinner, so that gives us some hope … as we continue to wait for a callback from the neuro team.
***
To boost our spirits and try to keep Lilly’s atrophy to a minimum, I took her for a short walk Monday morning (a couple of hours before the potty accident). I had hoped to go 1/4 mile, but Lilly barely made it a 1/8 of a mile. It took us 30 minutes, and I had to use the suitcase handle on her harness to help her walk. It wasn’t pretty, but she did the hard work.
I felt a weird mix of victory and heartbreak, seeing her struggle so much, when literally … just last week she was easily hiking 3 miles up the mountain and back.
Every time I begin to let myself believe this is going to be OK, we have another setback.