This was a distressing day. What we learned about Claude the blind Great Dane puppy was heartbreaking. I took this photo just before he was put inside the MRI machine at around 12:30 p.m. About two hours later, we met with the neurologist to learn the results. It turns out that Claude has a severe case of Wobblers Syndrome, and his spinal cord is significantly compressed at three different areas in his neck … at the juncture of vertebrae C3 and C4, C4 and C5, and C5 and C6. On the MRI images we could see the normally round spinal cord was squashed into a flat, almost box-like shape. It made us flinch looking at it.
But that wasn’t all. After reviewing the MRI results with us, the neurologist said, "I wish that were all I had to tell you, but I have some more bad news." Oh no.
He reached over and put two X-rays on the lightbox. I could tell before he said anything that we were looking at a very bad pair of hip joints. One looked like the ball was almost out of the socket. Those were Claude’s hips. At 10 months of age, he is already suffering from a severe case of hip displaysia. I would have guessed that the radiographs belonged to a 15 year-old dog … not a puppy.
I sat there, just floored. Severe hip displaysia in a 10-month old puppy?
And then we had a long and difficult conversation about the surgery for Wobblers Syndrome, likely outcomes, and what our options were given the orthopedic findings.
(Claude’s case is the type of Wobblers Syndrome that afflicts young, giant breed dogs, and is different from the Wobblers Syndrome seen in older Dobermans. It’s a different disease process.)
The neurologist said that Wobblers Syndrome was his "least favorite disease to treat." To begin with, the surgery — which takes 6 hours and requires three doctors and a support team of three vet techs — typically doesn’t improve the dog’s condition. Although occasionally you’ll see an animal with a slight improvement in symptoms, generally the best you can hope for is to stabilize the condition and prevent any further deterioration. This means Claude would remain like he is today … stumbling, falling down, knuckling over on his feet, and sinking to his knees when he pees. In fact, the vet hospital here generally does five of these operations a year, and they’ve found in follow-up studies that a year later, on average only three cases have what they consider "decent" outcomes.
We would not want Claude to live like he is today. Since this started, we’ve seen the spark disappear. And we know he would suffer pressure sores and constant wounds from dragging his rear feet when they knuckle over. (Because he can’t feel this happening now, he doesn’t even know he’s doing it.) Add to this Claude’s already severe hip displaysia, which will only get worse and more painful in coming months, and now we’ve got a quality of life decision to make.
In the best of all worlds, choosing to do the surgery is a major deal … the neurologist said the surgery and 10-day hospital stay for recovery would cost $6,500 to $7,500, and he described it as a "painful procedure" to insert the apparatus that would stabilize his neck — essentially an acrylic cement plate and dozens of screws affixed to his vertebrae.
After two rounds of conversations with the staff at the teaching hospital, a long phone call this evening with our primary care vet in Helena, Dr. Brenda Culver, and several calls with Alayne to review everything we learned today, we concluded that we would not put Claude through this. Making this decision was agonizing. We’ll do everything we can medically for an animal, but we have to know the outcome is worth it … and to see Claude continue like this, and to suffer from hip displaysia on top of it, doesn’t seem like the right thing to do for him.
We’ll bring him back to the ranch tomorrow and then love him up as much as we can before we have to say goodbye.
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Compared to Claude, the news on Brynn was, well, okay. After a lengthy endoscopy procedure, we learned that Brynn has not one but TWO ectopic ureters, both of which are emptying urine into her vagina. But she also does have a good-sized bladder, and the reason she seems to have some bladder function is because the urine is flowing back down from her vagina into the bladder. When it fills up, she actually will pee like a normal horse. And when we thought we saw urine in her uterus on ultrasound when she was two weeks old, well, we did … she had urine in there today, too. That’s because the urine is leaking backwards from her vagina and down into her uterus.
The surgeon, Dr. Claude Ragle, needs to run further diagnostics this week, but he was cautiously optimistic that he might be able to re-route the ureters into Brynn’s bladder. But we won’t know for sure until he completes his tests. Surgery would not occur until Thursday this week.
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(Click on photo for larger image.)
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