I met with Pepper’s neurologist, Dr. Fred Wininger, at WSU’s veterinary teaching hospital a short while ago to review his initial assessment of Pepper. She is, he said, “a very sick girl.” Dr. Wininger spoke this morning with our primary care vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, about the sequence of events leading up to the seizures, the diagnostic tests Brenda and her husband Britt, our internist, had conducted, and the nature of the seizures they witnessed Pepper having. As a result, we are going to proceed with an MRI today at 12:30 Pacific time, and Dr. Wininger will have the images to evaluate about an hour later. He will also do a spinal tap to see what her cerebral spinal fluid tells us.
However, because she is already suffering from significant neurological deficits, she is at risk from the anesthesia required for the MRI and spinal tap procedure. Yet without doing those, we won’t know what she has and what we can do for her, so it’s a risk we have to take.
He said there are a number of things that could be causing Pepper’s problems, and even an intercranial tumor might be operable … but it’s just too soon to know. Although we can’t get our hopes up, given her condition, Dr. Wininger said it’s not hopeless or he wouldn’t recommend moving forward with the MRI.
Dr. Wininger was also the neurologist who last year worked on Claude, our blind Great Dane puppy who had wobblers syndrome, so we know him very well and were very happy to see him take on Pepper’s case. I took the photo this morning of Dr. Wininger with Pepper in the ICU.
I’ll post more when we have more information on her condition.
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