I have a small terrier and I think she is dying.
She is 12 and has ways been very active, a beautiful, fun, gentle, excitable and mischievous member of our family.
She has largely been healthy but last year she had major surgery for a very vascular tumour in her neck. It was horrific and we said at the time that we would be reluctant to put her through the ordeal of surgery again. That said, in time she recovered and the vet was happy with the margins, no further treatment was required.
Two months ago she got what seemed to be a tummy bug. She Jackson Pollocked the kitchen with vomit and had a terrible runny bum.
We took her to the vets and they said, yes a tummy bug, lots of it around, gave her an injection and some tablets and sent us on our way.
Since then we have been back 5 times.
One thing about her is that if she has ever been caught short or unwell, she has always been very civilised and taken it to the kitchen, which makes clean ups very easy (previously infrequent). Nothing to do with training. We think she trained us, just a great dog and quite fastidious. This is no longer the case and it's clear she has no warning any more.
She no longer eats having been a typical terrier and scrounger all her life and famously once stealing the Christmas turkey... a real character that we always forgave for every bit of mischief.
Now if we are lucky we might be able to coax her to accept a blob of paste with a tablet hidden in it or a very tiny morsel of chicken.
She now has urinary incontinence, and is confused and exhausted.
She doesn't vomit or have diarrhoea any more, and in fact that was a fairly short lived situation at the beginning.
She has lost a third of her body weight, and she wasn't tubby to start with. Each time we go back, the vet brightly announces a further drop in weight.
She tremors constantly. She us lying next to me right now, just shaking.
Last night she peed in our bed which is something that has never happened before. We think it happened in her sleep, and the poor thing absented herself from the bed after it happened. So the dementia she apparently has is not so bad that she wasn't concerned. (To be clear we don't punish for the pee. We never would. This is clearly beyond her control, completely uncharacteristic, and we have just ordered some nappies for overnight).
She has had blood tests, urinalysis, and most recently, at our insistence an ultrasound.
At one stage the vet said it was pancreatitis, but that was discounted with blood tests.
They also said she has arthritis and muscle wastage, (started Librella), has probably had some mini strokes, and has the onset of doggy dementia.
The scan showed thickening of the stomach wall, but not localised, the whole stomach is thickened. So they just said its some kind of unflammation. She is on pred, pardale, omeprazole.
She simply isnt recovering. None of the medication seems to have had any impact. I had thought the pred might perk her up but shes been on it 5 days now and nothing has changed.
If anything she is getting worse.
We are at our wits end.
She looks to us like she is dying in front of us, and the vets are very nice, but we seem to be no closer to knowing what is happening, and it almost feels like they are appeasing us....
But if she's not eating... she's going to die isn't she?
I'm not sure why I am here, whether it's for a hand hold or someone to give me an idea to chase down with the vets, because they seem very laissez faire.
I've just ordered some high calorie liquid which I've been squirting into her mouth with a syringe but if it's giving her 50 calories a day I'd be surprised.
This is no life for a dog and part of me has started to wonder if I need to broach the question of whether, if there is no answer or cure, we should consider putting her out of her misery.
We are all devastated at this thought, and we have kind of come to it over a series of concerned looks at each other, no one wanting to air it because it's so unspeakable, but everyone thinking it.
How can the poor darling be left to suffer like this. It's unspeakable.
All she does is lie next to me shaking.
Refuses to go for walks. We used to have to spell the word walk rather than say it out loud because she would lose her mind with excitement, now we have to pick her up and carry her out the door for her to stagger a few paces up the road and wee before pulling back towards home.
No poops have been forthcoming now for days. It's just so painful to watch her suffer. She is clearly sad, no interest in her toys.
I don't know what to do, and I'm worried we have been selfish in not seeking to release her sooner because we can't bear to lose her. It just seems so insane that there is no answer to her suffering.