Wheeze

Yesterday started off well enough. Until we got home from morning errands to find our precious Pembroke Welsh Corgi, Spider, having a terrible amount of trouble breathing and generally looking disoriented and dazed. His gums were slightly pale and I decided that it was no time to piddlefart around and hope he snapped out of it.

We rushed him to the vet (thankfully just down the road, so the trip was short). I carried his 42 lbs of corgi (he’s slightly chubby) into the lobby and basically said, “My dog’s having trouble breathing and I don’t know why.” I’m very eloquent and descriptive when I’m just this side of panicking.

That was somewhat a fib; I had a good idea about why he was having trouble breathing. When we got back home, bleach fumes filled the portion of the house closest to the front door. It was being used for cleaning in a little hallway/alcove near our room door, and Spider being in his crate near our door was subjected to any undiluted fumes which snuck under the door itself.

Anyhow, after a short but agonizing wait for the vet techs and vet himself to get ready, we got Spider into the exam room where he was given the once over and the vet said there was obviously some labored breathing and his heart rate was a little slow, but could not conclude from just a physical exam that the bleach fumes were the cause of such a severe reaction. He suggested he admit Spider to run some tests: x-rays and blood work to rule out things like heartworm. We agreed and were told to come back in a couple of hours.

The wait at home was even more agonizing than the one in the vet’s lobby. We tried to nap to pass time, but sleep was hard to achieve due to the amount of worry and stress we were experiencing. Around 2pm (approximately two hours after we left Spider at the vet), I called and they said they’d done the x-rays and blood test and that there were no life-threatening issues immediately present. He was negative on heartworm disease and his lungs looked mostly fine, but he was positive on Lyme Disease. They gave him an injection of cortisone to reduce his respiratory inflammation and said it was probably a combination of him having allergies (to pollen, mostly) and exposure to the fumes which triggered a severe asthmatic response. He was going to be put on a prescription of Prednisone for the respiratory issues and Doxycycline for the Lyme Disease. I was then told to give him a couple of more hours to let the cortisone work and then the vet would inspect him again and we could come in to pick him up.

Around 4pm, we went back to the clinic and talked with Dr. Wolfsthal about the causes of the problem, the Lyme Disease and the medications. He showed us the x-rays he took, explained what was what and what was wrong and generally covered all the immediate bases.

After that, Spider was brought to us, had a little piddle accident on the examination room floor (a thank you to the vet, I suppose) and we loaded him up and took him home.

He’s on his meds now, is pretty drowsy most of the time, but slowly doing better and better. We finally got him eating again, so it’s a good sign he’s recovering. Here’s hoping this is a continuing trend and he’ll be pretty close to full recovery by his next appointment in three weeks.