Heart Attacks and Money Pits

If you ask me, a Siberian husky's main goals in life are to give you regular heart attacks and a spend all your money.  Juno is not just achieving her goals, but blowing past them, leaving them in the dust and me and Mr. Wild Dingo, barely alive from regular heart attacks and broke. This is Juno, above, last Wednesday. She found a stick and pranced around the yard, mocking Loki for having a better toy than him. I couldn't help but smile so we goofed around a bit with it. I know sticks can be dangerous to dogs, but this one was soft and it seemed harmless.

This is Juno Saturday morning. Don't judge Internet. It was an iPad camera and I was trying to entice Mr. Wild Dingo by texting him photos of his favorite hussy from the bedroom so he'd come up to give her belly rubs.

This is Juicy Saturday night at the vet. We still don't know what happened. At 2 p.m. I tried to take her for a walkie and she wouldn't have it. I thought she had a tummy ache so I gave her a prilosec, which I've done for her before on vet's advice. A few hours later, her right eye was shut tight and she was lethargic. I gave her a benydryl thinking it was a bee sting. I looked everywhere for something in her eye, ear or nose, and saw nothing. By 7:30 she wouldn't eat dinner so we took her to the ER. By then she had a 105 fever and was sneezing blood-tinged fluid from her nose. So basically her symptoms were 105 fever, sneezing blood tinged fluid from right nostril, squeezing shut right eye, lethargy, no appetite. The ideas were something stuck up there to cause abrasion or nose cancer. We had to leave her overnight to bring down the fever with antibiotics and fluids.  The next morning the ER vet called with next ideas on how to diagnose it so sedated her, stuck a small cone up there to check and found an abrasion on the inside fold of her snooter.  The vet did not see any sign of blood further back, and it looked clean. She mentioned it looked like a stick got up there, which of course triggered the stick memory from Wednesday. The ER vet laughed when I told her, thinking an 11 year old dog still going after sticks was impressive! Sigh. A testament to both Juicy's tenacious life force and her commitment to the ultimate Siberian achievement: highest number of heart attacks given to the Mommy and the highest amount of green papers Poppy forced to give up.

This is Juicy the next day, Sunday afternoon, looking better already. In fact yesterday (Wednesday), she was so full of pep, she pushed me to walk extra miles with her, pulling hard to go further than she has before. I've had similar reactions with Lyme and antibiotics. Right after you get some antibiotics to bring down the inflammation from infection, you suddenly feel amazing, like a bolt of energy. Sometimes the antibiotics made me sicker too but sometimes they took off the top layer of inflammation from my multiple illnesses, and it felt like a huge relief.

For a few days her snooter stayed crusty and she snortled a bit and I was certain she'd need the next diagnostic procedure on the table: rhinoscopy and CT scan. But on Tuesday when she went into her regular dawgtor at The Whole Pet Vet, she was doing even better and had good appetite. So it was best to do a wait and see in 5 days. I learned that dogs, just like humans, express inflammation differently. Some express it with fever, like Juno did even with small local infections, a dog can have an bigger immune response to it.  Some dogs express it other ways, like for Loki, he itches, and licks or he'll have issues with his belly and digestion. But Juicy always spikes a fever with the smallest infections. It's certainly odd that she presented with those specific group of symptoms but based on her immediate reaction to antibiotics plus there was nothing to be seen in the first look up there with a cone, we concluded we weren't dealing with nose cancer. In fact, our vet said she'd seen lots of nose cancer cases and that it didn't normally present this suddenly or this odd group of symptoms. It's a relief knowing we don't have to do more scoping especially since Juno notoriously hates anesthesia.

See? Her right snooter is back to normal. No crusties, no blood, no snot. Just another heart attack and another gazillion bucks given to another dogtor.  Damn sibes. Can't live without them because that would be too easy.