Rolling Dog Farm Blog

Our treasured old German Shepherd, Pappy, is back in the hospital tonight.  In July he had miraculously survived both pneumonia and meningitis.  He spent 10 days in the hospital then and took weeks to regain his strength once he came home.  But Pappy had been back to his old self for a quite a while, going out with us on barn chores and supervising Alayne and me as we made our rounds. 

Yesterday morning, however, he seemed reluctant to go out with us on barn chores, so we left him inside.  Yesterday evening we noticed he was coughing and gagging periodically … nothing major, but not normal.  Then Alayne remembered this was how his last episode with pneumonia had started.  Uh oh.  We started him on two antibiotics, Baytril and Augmentin.  This morning he had a fever of 104.2.  I called our specialist in Missoula, Dr. Dave Bostwick, and sounded the alarm.

I bundled him in the truck and drove the 60 miles into town.  Dave took some X-rays that showed, sure enough, aspiratory pneumonia.  This is the result of Pappy somehow getting bits of food or fluids into his lungs.  But why again — and so soon?  Dave checked Pappy’s gag reflex by sticking his hand into Pappy’s mouth.  Although we could tell that Pappy’s eyes and brain registered "Hey, this guy just shoved his hand into my mouth!", inside his throat there was little gagging.  That showed there was hardly any effort by the larnyx to close up and keep that hand out out of the trachea. 

The larynx has several jobs to do, and a crucial one is to protect the airways and keep food and other debris out of the lungs.  Dave explained that in old dogs, the laryngeal nerves can decay, leading to failure to keep food out of the lungs.  This nerve decay can also affect their ability to bark — the larynx is where the vocal cords are, too.  Sure enough, Pappy’s bark was virtually non-existent this evening. 

There isn’t anything we can do to fix this nerve decay problem, so the only thing we can do is try and stay on top of the potential for pneumonia.  That means keeping Pappy on a daily antibiotic, probably Baytril.  By this afternoon Pappy’s temperature had returned to normal, but we put him on IVs and I left him at the hospital this evening.  He will stay there for the next couple of days to make sure we knock out this bout of pneumonia quickly.  At Pappy’s age, and given what he just went through in July, we can’t run any risks.

You can see Pappy’s original story here.  To read about Pappy’s homecoming from his last hospital stay in July, click here.