Stormy Update - long one

[Rich]

It has been a rough and roller coaster week with Stormy. I won't bore you with the cascade of stuff we have had to deal with in addition to Stormy's problems, but just one should suffice. Our whole neighborhood has been without a phone since Friday and the technology geniuses at Qwest do not seem able to tell us when our service will be restored, so I had to wait to get to work to post.

So it was a week ago Sunday that Stormy went down. Monday morning he could take a few steps, but by Tuesday, he was completely limp, had no pain reflex in his left rear leg but some in his right. However, he still had bladder control and if we carried him out and with one hand on each back leg stood him up, he could take care of business.  I believe it was Monday that my back started to warn me that it was about to have a major outage - and Deb has lower back arthritis and some osteoporosis, so getting this 32 pound dog up off the carpet, carried outside, put down on the ground, and wheelbarrowed around by the back legs has been no picnic and last night we were just in a state of complete collapse.

However! We did take him in to see the vet. His attitude on Tuesday was pretty poor and although he continued to have a good appetite, he took little interest in anything else. By Thursday, attitude wise, he was back to his old self - taking an interest in what we were doing and voicing displeasure when he couldn't get to the kitchen to do some begging. So by the time the vet saw him, his spirits were good and he hadn't lost any weight since last visit. The vet was very encouraging that efforts to keep him going would be worthwhile. While she couldn't tell whether his symptoms were from stroke or vertebral, she suggested that MRI or X-ray to diagnosis probably wasn't worth it since we were not considering heroic measures. Instead she gave him a big intravenous steroid shot and sent us home with a bottle of oral prednisone.

Then Saturday afternoon in between dealing with minor disasters around the house, I started to build him a cart. Then Saturday afternoon, he actually lurched to his feet and walked across the room to get to his water bowl. Saturday evening and Sunday he would spontaneously get up now and then and take a few steps.

Which brings us to last night. We were awakened at 2:30 by whining and discovered that he had had diarrhea in his bed.  So we got up and went into cleaning mode. Then we got him outside to see if he needed to empty any more (the steroids have made him drink more, pee more) which he didn't so we went back to bed and were just about to doze off when he started to whine again. At this point, exhausted from a rough weekend in general and dog carrying specifically we were very down. So I got up again and as soon as I turned on the light Stormy got up and walked out of the bedroom, down the hall and across the dining room to get to his water dish! A distance of roughly 40 feet!.  He fell down 2 or three times but got right back up and was able to lurch on. (more next post)