more updates

[la_belle_laide]

Today, five minutes after being told that my car was going to cost me $2000, I got a call from the animal hospital. The vet told me, "Well, I have some good news, and some other stuff." But in actuality, there was no "good news" at all, and it was all "other stuff."

Haku woke with a fever and a heart murmur. Her immediate thought was bacterial endocarditis, so they started him on wide spectrum antibiotics right away. She ordered a blood culture (which can take three days or more) and for him to see a cardiologist and get an EKG, which they couldn't do until Saturday. Depending on which valve is leaking (can't tell without the cardiologist) it could be about as bad as you can imagine. As far as how they were thinking the bacteria got in there in the first place, no one knows. From his liver, his intestine, or whatever. Anything but the surgery, apparently.

Then I had to go go work, which was a miserable experience. Every time my clients would flip over and lie prone, I'd start crying again. Haku is only six. I don't know what I'd do without him.

Right after work I picked up my car with Mom, and we went to the vets to visit. There's a new vet there, an internist who I've never even seen before. While we were sitting with Haku, he told us his thoughts.

He doesn't think it's endocarditis. He thinks the heart murmur is left over from the incident he had while under sedation. I asked him how the fever tied in with that, and he said that Haku has a history of running a temperature after all of his surgeries, and anyway his fever wasn't all that high. So he canceled the blood culture. They have Haku on mega-antibiotics because that's how they would treat endocarditis anyway, and doing a blood culture isn't going to tell anything that they won't know in 36 hours anyway. If the heart murmur is sequela to the anesthesia, it could just disappear.

I asked all these clinical questions (where does the fever fit in, where would bacteria come from, which valve would you suspect if it was actually endocarditis [no way to tell without the ekg/ultrasound] etc.) Finally my Mom asked him, "But what is your gut feeling?" He said his gut feeling was that it wasn't endocarditis because—even though he doesn't know Haku—he's not acting like an endocarditis dog.

Of course, this all made me feel a lot better (until they showed me the bill, FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS,) but still: I know better than to feel relieved after a vet tells me that it's probably okay. I learned that the hard way from Dr. Dickwhistle, with Trisky. He kept telling me she was okay, he kept sending her home on buffered aspirin, he kept telling me I was "bein gsuch a girl" and "getting hysterical" and "haha maybe it's anaplasma and she caught it from Sano!" (The untreated anaplasma was what caused Sano's ITP, incidentally, because Dr. Dickwhistle said that was no big deal and could be ignored.) And Trisky, as you might remember, ended up having bone cancer and was gone three weeks later.

Trisky had a heart murmur too. I was thinking about this today, because the vet who found Haku's murmur is the same one who found Trisky's. I remember sitting in his office while he listened to it, and him saying, "Wow, that's a 6, it doesn't get much louder than that. It's one of the worst ones I've ever heard." That's why I had to wait to x ray her leg; because they wouldn't anesthetize her without an ultrasound/ekg. However, when that came back, they said it wasn't that bad after all.

So when the tech tonight was describing to me about when the vet found it, how he was describing the sounds and saying how pronounced it was, all I could think of was that. When he said Trisky's was really bad, that ended up being not so terrible. But then of course, I lost her anyway.

I guess it comes down to me not knowing what to think. I learned from years of experience that when a vet tells you "Well, it's probably not that bad," it actually is that bad. Dr. Dickwhistle had that way of brushing off every concern until it was too late.

With this guy, he's treating it anyway, so that's a good thing. Even if it ended up that that's what he has, it's still being treated.

I have this feeling that the heart murmur isn't going to go away, though. Just because this is Haku and he doesn't have that kind of luck. I feel like his temp will go down, but he'll still need the ekg and ultrasound (which by the way is $700.) I remember when he first started having seizures and all that stuff went on, they were finding liver issues and an ovary and a kidney floating around in there (I asked around about that kidney, too: general veterinary consensus is that Dr. Dickwhistle actually cut the ureter during Haku's cryptorchid surgery, though no one would say so on record and strangely, the files from that surgery are gone...) and all of this. When they found the infected kidney and removed it, they said, "This could have been the source of the seizures! With any luck, he won't have another one."

Well, there isn't any luck. So I'm still expecting the worst.