Stevie is having problems. He's an old dog, and you can expect that, but his problems are not the usual old dog problems.
For one thing, he doesn't look or act anywhere near his age, which is 15 or 16. Most people think he's about six or seven, and few would doubt that to see him go galumphing through the snow, chasing squirrels, and wrestling with the other dogs. He's the amazing un-aging dog, and we'd like to keep him forever.
He got too rambuctious and broke a toenail right through the entire quick. He had a bloody nose, too, from (we thought) rubbing his nose so hard on the floor to lick his sore paw, which must have hurt in the extreme. So I took him in to have the toenail taken care of, which meant having him knocked out. Since we had to do that anyway, I had them clean his teeth, and remove some truly hideous "old dog bumps" that looked like miniature brains growing out of his skin, two of which were on his head. I kept expecting those things to grow eyes and greasy little mouths. They were nasty.
He wasn't even at the vet's more than a day, but came home with a dog cold virus neverthelss. Seems like every time I take one of my dogs to the vet, they get a cold virus. And they've both had bordatella (kennel cough) vaccines, so that's not it.
Even though he got over the cold, it seemed like he never got over the cold. He kept wheezing and then finally, over the last three or four days, started sneezing so hard his nose started bleeding again. Then he'd sneeze again and spray blood and sometimes dog snot all OVER the room in varying sizes ranging from speck to goopy blob. Yesterday morning his nose wouldn't stop bleeding, and I had to drive into town over icy, windy roads, trying to hold a paper towel over his nose so he wouldn't cover the car, and me, with blood.
We made it to the vet okay, and his nose finally stopped bleeding, though there was still a drip now and then. The vet said it could be an inflammation and we had two choices: 1)leave him there and have them knock him out, irrigate his nose, take a skull xray, and look up his nose with a, erm, up-the-nose tool, or 2)give him some antibiotics and see if that solved the problem.
Option 1 would cost about $150, I was told. Option 2, which I took, was $100, it turned out. The Clavamox that the vet prescribed and sold me cost $75. I complained that it was more than people medicine, and I knew that because I don't have any insurance myself! Turns out that this Clavamox is the latest and greatest thing, same thing as Augmentin for people, which is ultra expensive.
This morning I woke up at 4:30 AM because Stevie was sneezing super hard again. I got out of bed and got him situated on the couch on my black, nylon jacket and then covered the whole area around him with paper towels. If you know Stevie, you know he's one of the most cooperative dogs you've ever met. He was this morning, thank goodness, and he stayed on the couch and let me blot him, and we waited the episode out together. At 7:30 I headed down to town with Stevie dripping beside me, and I dropped him off for the aforementioned Option 1.
At 4:00 I picked him up. He wasn't even woozy from the anesthetic! I was glad to see that, because it took him two days the last time to be himself again. But when the vet took me into the examining room, I knew that it wasn't good.
"Normally you can't see too much in skull x-rays, but," and here he shuffled through a whole bunch of x-rays, "you can see here on the left side that it's black, lots of air, and that's good, " he said, pointing to Stevie's left sinus. I looked at the left sinus. It looked like a cobwebbed cave. A very cobwebbed cave.
"It's cancer," I said.
"Probably," said the vet, "but we should send the tissue out just to know for sure. He might have a fungal infection, those can look like this sometimes..." he trailed off and I knew he was just saying something to make it seem less painful.
The vet took a deep breath and said, "And that isn't all. When I have an animal sedated like that, I like to give them a good palpating to make sure everything is okay. Stevie's pancreas felt round and enlarged. I had the other vets check it, and they thought it was very much like a tumor, almost certainly a tumor."
He went on to tell me that the pancreas can get benign tumors, but it sounded a lot like the talk about the fungal infection.
"Did you take a needle biopsy?"
"No, usually you just get red blood cells and it bleeds a lot." Plus I bet it would be pretty darn painful for Stevie, I thought.
So we agreed to send the tissue blown out of Stevie's nose to the pathology lab, which cost me another $100. Today's bill was $270, total. They did take back the super expensive Clavamox and let me put him on Cephalexin instead ($15), but that victory, as you can understand, was a bit hollow.
So that's the story. It's not a funny one, or a clever one, but it is a true one. Unfortunately.
