Dogs

Missy and Hypoglycemia

/ Dr. Christine McFadden / Leave a comment

She was so small that her big sister was a Beanie Baby. She’d been sold straight from a cardboard box in the parking lot of a Big Box store. Her owners were entranced from the moment her fluffy 1 ½ pound body hit their hands. The sellers were short on details like birthdates. We guessed her to be 2 months old? She was christened Missy, her basic exam checked out, and she had her first vaccination before they took her home.

The roller coaster ride had begun. Sadly, Missy had already been exposed to Parvo virus. Parvo is dreaded throughout our Valley, as we seem to see a lot of this viral disease in young, usually unvaccinated dogs. With no immunity, they fall ill, exhibiting extreme vomiting and a watery bloody diarrhea. The virus further attacks their body by dropping their white cell count, so they can’t fight off the infection. Many puppies die from the disease. Supportive therapy in-hospital with intravenous fluids and medication provide life support while their body recovers. It’s a puppy’s best chance to survive. Missy was sick so quickly we knew that she had been incubating the disease when she was brought in and the vaccine wouldn’t have had time to provide protection. (The vaccine itself does not cause the disease) Further complicating matters was her very small size. She had no body fat to speak of. Placing an intravenous catheter in her threadlike leg vein was a miracle. And like many tiny, tiny puppies she couldn’t keep her blood sugar up without constant eating – and Missy couldn’t keep anything down. If her blood glucose levels plummeted she might faint, seizure or even die. To counteract this, we added dextrose to her IV fluid drip. And then we worried about overloading her tiny body with fluids or we might flood her heart! We have an IV syringe pump that carefully meters each drop to these most extremely small of all patients.

Missy was a fighter. She gamely held on and after four days Missy turned around and successfully fought off parvo. Hurrah! But within days it became obvious that Missy’s body couldn’t regulate her blood sugar levels on it’s own. She would appear dazed and weak at home for no obvious reason. I had to explain that Missy couldn’t waste a mouthful on treats – many treats are high in sugar (check the labels for corn syrup, dextrose, sugar beets, etc) and just as with diabetics, it gives a quick sugar high and then just as quickly dips back down. The dangerous Sugar Rollercoaster. Don’t take that ride! Missy needed to eat dog food, with protein, fat, slow-release complex carbohydrates (carbs are the sugars in food) and the calcium, vitamins and minerals a growing puppy needs. For several days she had to be fed every two hours, including at least once during the night. We expected her to outgrow this…. but when?

Missy’s body did learn to self-regulate. She grew to over 4 pounds. She finished her series of puppy shots and had no further health set-backs. We set the date for her ovariohysterectomy /spay for 8 months of age, when I could reevaluate her teeth – tiny dogs often have delayed dental eruption (they are slow to lose their baby teeth) and if retained, the baby teeth will crowd the adult teeth, trapping food particles and eventually rot out both teeth! It is so much easier on the puppy to remove these excess baby teeth under the same anesthesia they undergo for their spay / neuter surgery. We schedule the surgery when the adult teeth have come in. The big day came. We checked Missy’s blood sugar before surgery. Normal. We checked her teeth – she had retained three deciduous canine (fang) teeth. We extracted them. Hurrah!

Monitors beeping calmly, we proceeded to spay Missy. She acted like a completely normal patient, recovering beautifully. Hurrah! Postoperative blood glucose tests were all normal. Another hurrah! I don’t know if her little feet ever touch the ground (spoiled by love), but in addition to all the other miracles, Missy is a superb outgoing doggie friend to everyone she meets. Hurrah!


Christine B. McFadden, DVM
drmc@mcmenagerie.com

Hysterical Clients

/ Dr. Christine McFadden / 1 Comment

Who said veterinary medicine wasn’t fun?

There’s the man who got out of jail (he didn’t say why- either for going in or getting out) and came home to find his dog sick. This enraged him. We know this because he brought the dog to us (he was passing by, thought he’d drop in) and he was very thorough in his explanations to us of society’s injustices, particularly that he might have to take financial responsibility for his pet. We couldn’t diagnose the illness without a blood test – and magic wands are out of date, though I kept one on my desk for years. We’ve kept statues of the Virgin Mary, Buddha, dice, and a crystal ball. We do not turn our nose up at anything that might intervene on behalf of our patients. In the science-based world of medicine we have seen miracles – but we have also seen cases where the pet should have lived, by all rights, but died. In the end, we fall back upon diagnostic tests because they do just that: they help us to diagnose your pet’s illness, to unlock the pieces of the medical mystery so that we may help the patient.


This man was very angry. The time spent in jail seemed not to have been used for self-reflection or internal contemplation. It seemed unlikely that he read poetry. We thought we should focus on the dog. We weren’t entirely sure he could focus well enough to drive. He had no interest in paying to care for his dog nor did he wish to surrender it to a Rescue group. So he left. Only to return a half hour later, which we noticed immediately because his car was sideswiped as he drove in to the parking lot. While he was waiting for the police to show up (to investigate the accident) he surrendered the dog to Rescue. Post-script : dog did great.

And I fondly recall Crack-A-Nose. Her name alone kinda gives you a heads-up, yes? A pitbull, she had a huge pink mass of doughnut-shaped tissue protruding from her vulva. Bigger than your fist. It was very dramatic. This dog had a condition called vaginal hyperplasia, or swollen vaginal tissue. It is not a true prolapse of the vagina nor a cancerous tumor. It occurs when a female dog has been in heat, producing high amounts of estrogen. The swollen tissue will shrink back to normal size when the estrogen hormone has declined – and the fastest, most effective and permanent cure for that is to recommend an ovariohysterectomy or spay. I explained all of this to her owner, a young woman who was rail thin with blond hair, beautiful, a little twitchy. The young woman pulled a fistful of hundred dollar bills out of her bag. She requested that I perform whatever services were required and informed me that she would pay in full right then. I agreed to her terms and performed surgery successfully that night. I figure the dog must’ve been a great guard dog for some very important stash, oops, stuff.

Now stop me if I’ve told you this one before. This was when I worked in a small office off Highway 59, still called “J” street back then. I remember the skirt I was wearing because it was the last time I’d ever wear it. It was quiet, around lunchtime. A man in his twenties came in. He announced that his dog had been run over by a mower. I was nearby and nodded, told him to bring the dog in. Occasionally you see an overactive puppy bouncing around a lawn mower and accidentally getting a toe clipped. Not very serious. He stared at me. But he’s bleeding, he said. I nodded again. This was to be expected. Please bring him in.

And he did. Only he hadn’t been talking about some little push mower, he meant a tractor hay/disc mower (the tractor weighs over a half ton) and it had practically amputated the dogs’ leg, so the “bleeding” he’d mentioned was an enormous spraying jet of blood from the severed femoral artery. The dog was going to bleed out – I was surprised it hadn’t died already. I stepped in with a pair of hemostats to stop the gushing fountain and got lucky. I completed the amputation in a sterile surgery and the dog lived. But my clothes were history.

Christine B. McFadden, DVM

drmc@mcmenagerie.com

The Raw Movement

/ Dr. Christine McFadden / Leave a comment

There has been a call for us to return to the simpler life, back towards the days when all things were more “natural”. Sounds healthier, yes? “Natural equals healthy” they shout. Raw milk for the family and raw meat for the dog. Ummmmmm. Not always. I myself am happy to be the beneficiary of many scientific discoveries. Let’s take a look.

In 1928, Penicillin, the first true antibiotic, was discovered. An antibiotic is a medicine that destroys bacteria and other microorganisms (germs). Prior to that, the average life expectancy for a person was around 48 years of age. Before antibiotics people and animals often died from infection. Childbirth, surgery, and many diseases were often a death sentence because of the attendant infection. In the year 2019, the average person may expect to live until they are 80 years of age. Why the change? In large part, because of the decrease in deaths from infectious diseases. Antibiotics, Vaccinations, Disinfectants and Sterilization, improved hygiene. Thank you, research scientists!

In 1950 over half the American population lived on farms. Over the next 20 years farms and the multi-party line telephone would disappear as young people moved to the cities and family farms consolidated into mega-businesses. Suburbia was born. Also in flux was how we viewed and cared for our pets. There are fewer working dogs today, and their work has evolved from livestock assistance on the farm into service roles, stepping in to assist people with physical or emotional disabilities. Dogs and cats are recognized for the vital role they play in our everyday lives. We want to care for them the very best that we can, and how we feed them has come under scrutiny as we question our own diet.

It’s true that wolves, foxes and other wild canidae eat raw meat. The average life expectancy of a wolf in the wild is 6-8 years. In captivity, a wolf may live 16-18 years. A wild fox may live 2-5 years; captive, 14 years. Wildlife face a host of “natural” hardships: starvation, infection from contagious diseases (no vaccinations!), infection from wounds and parasites. This is life at its most natural. Most pet dog breeds have been domesticated for centuries. Most can expect to live 10-15 years.

It’s interesting to me that the raw food which people purchase to feed their dog is still a processed food (unless you’ve farmed and slaughtered the meat yourself), susceptible to all the bacterial infections they’re supposed to be trying to avoid.  Raw meat can be contaminated by listeria, salmonella, E Coli, campylobacter and more. What is interesting is that the proponents of RAW claim healthier coats or more energy – not a longer life or true overall health. One on-line site stated that a benefit to feeding a raw diet was that you had total control of what was included in your dog’s food – laughable! We are all aware of the food recalls for both human and animal products : listeria in cheese, E coli in spinach, campylobacter in chicken, salmonella and listeria in commercial raw dog foods.

The truth is : Bacteria aren’t going away. Like us, they fight for survival. They mutate and re-form and will turn up again and again. The Center for Disease Control (CDC), our national public health institute in Atlanta, Georgia, has a battalion of researchers and scientists that follow disease trends throughout the United States and around the world. They’re work is to safeguard us – sometimes from ourselves.

When a client requests advice on what to feed their pets I have a stock answer : Go with the tried and true. Go with a company that has been making pet food for decades, with decades of investment into research of breed needs, life stage requirements, and years of following pets to monitor their health, making any necessary adjustments to their foods along the way. They have invested their livelihood in formulating foods to help your pet to thrive. Often there are a variety of choices within each brand, with ingredient modification to meet the financial abilities of the buyer while still providing decent nutrition for the pet. Bon appetit!

Christine B. McFadden, DVM

drmc@mcmenagerie.com