The next day, April 28th she didn't want to eat and for several days I did my best to tempt her with any food. I kept trying a ton of new foods recommended by our in home vet, Dr. Lynn and foods I knew she loved. Anything to get her to eat. If she liked the smell of it enough she would try it once and only a little bit. I tried Fresh Pet for small dogs which she ate for a few meals. She enjoyed baby lil' sticks for two meals and then refused. I seriously tried every food I could think of. For our food motivated Doxie who would eat anything that you handed her, we knew this was bad. She was slowing down. I was running out of foods that she would accept meds in.
Related Articles
Our primary vet, Dr. Johnson was unavailable to give his recommendation on how to help her. The other vet in his office, without full blood work, gave us the option of placing her on a kidney food diet, providing subcutaneous fluids daily and adding Entyce to her med lineup to get her to eat. He stated that the kidney food is not really appetizing and that we would need to try a few probably.
Our in home vet, Dr. Lynn quickly did full blood work calling us on May 2nd with the results of multi organ failure. Add this on top of the undiagnosed brain tumor that caused those horrible seizures two months ago, a new heart murmur and pancreatitis issues.
We learned from our big girls and did not want our little Hailey going through testing and hospitalization where she would be scared and may pass away. We also didn't want to subject her to things where her quality of life afterwards would be worse. We made the gut wrenching decision to stop Hailey's suffering which is the best gift that we could ever give her.
What I struggle with the most is that Hailey was stable and had a great quality of life before surgery. I mean, right up to the day of surgery. She was happy and having fun. Every day I had fun activities planned for her that she absolutely enjoyed. During her first week of recovery, I had all of her little outfits and golden egg toys picked out and ready for when she was better.
The vet that we have trusted her whole life recommended it stating we needed to know what type of cancer it was for later in her life. After surgery and that horrible first night which was out of character for her, you could see she was getting back to normal. Once she was able to be on hard kibble again we resumed doing the things that she loved which she enjoyed. I believe whatever medical event took place within her on April 25th was the beginning of her decline.
I was previously unaware and a google search taught me that, "Studies show that 0.9%–2.0% of patients that receive general anesthesia will develop kidney dysfunction 7–14 days after anesthesia." The vet office that performed her surgery said no, this could not be a factor. From my view over everything that I saw is that this was a big coincidence and the timeline fit for when Hailey started to decline.
Along with this line of thinking, I do wonder if decompensation occurred. Meaning, "When a dog can no longer hide or mask the signs and symptoms of disease and suddenly becomes very obviously sick. Dogs have a talent and instinct for compensation, or hiding their symptoms, which is why they can seem to get sick “overnight” when they finally decompensate."
This post was written for my reference after we let Hailey go.
