I took this photo yesterday of blind Widget and three-legged Ella with Dr. Bryan Harnett, a board-certified internal medicine specialist at Vermont Veterinary Internal Medicine in Burlington. While our small animal primary care vets are nearby, the specialists are in larger cities in southern New Hampshire or in Vermont.
Burlington, which is a two-hour drive from here (about the same distance as Helena to Missoula), also has a Costco, where we get a lot of our supplies. The nearest (and only) Costco in New Hampshire is in Nashua, near the border with Massachusetts; that's a much longer drive, and there are no specialists in Nashua. And since we are all about maximizing our time and fuel usage by packing as much into one trip as possible, it made sense to use Burlington as our "medical and supply hub," as it were.
We were looking for an internal medicine specialist because Ella needed heartworm treatment. We knew she was heartworm positive when we she first came, but because of the timing of her other medical procedures (her amputation in Louisiana) and the impending move to New Hampshire, we needed to wait until she got settled here to begin the lengthy treatment. Although some primary care vets will do the treatment, our local vets at the Whitefield Animal Hospital were more comfortable referring us to a specialist for it. It can be very tricky, and while remote, there is the risk of death from pulmonary embolism. (For more detail on this subject, see the American Heartworm Society.)
Ella still needs to be spayed, too — but we can't afford the risk of anesthesia for that procedure until she has the heartworms taken care of. Her amputation in Shreveport was emergency surgery because of her infected stump of a leg; we had hoped the vet could spay her while she was under the anesthesia then, but the operation took longer than the vet expected and he didn't want to keep her under any longer than absolutely necessary.
So first things first — heartworm treatment! Ella had the initial injection yesterday, and then I will take her back in a month for a two-injection series over two days.
And since we were seeing an internal medicine specialist, I took Widget along for an ultrasound of her organs. We do this on a lot of our geriatric dogs as "insurance" — we've had too many cases in the past where routine blood work looked fine but we lost them to an unsuspected tumor of some sort. (My own beloved Dolly was one of those.) The only thing Dr. Harnett noticed were some mild changes in Widget's kidneys. Nothing to suggest renal failure, but enough that we need to start her on a lower-protein diet and then re-check in six months for any further changes.
With more than 1,000 pounds (453 kg) of supplies in the back of the truck, I loaded up the two girls, said goodbye to Dr. Harnett and his wonderful staff, and headed back to New Hampshire.
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