#melody problems

From August 4th to August 8th my dad, my uncle, and Melody were up at the family cottage (I was at my mom’s). According to my dad, everything seemed fine there. When they got home in the evening of August 8th, Melody didn’t eat, but it isn’t too unusual for her to skip a meal after coming home from the cottage. My dad didn’t worry about it and left the food bowl down for her overnight, expecting the food to be eaten by the time he got up for work the next morning like it usually is in these situations.

When my dad woke up the next morning (August 9th) he checked the food dish and none of it had been eaten. He thought that maybe this was Melody being stressed from travel longer than usual because of her age, but he wanted to get something into her stomach, so he tried giving her one of the hard treats she likes. Melody took it, bit into it, yelped, and spat everything out. He had to get to work, but once he was there he called me about what had happened, and said he’d try to get a vet appointment to look at her teeth. The earliest he could get was August 14th, so that’s what he booked. That night when he got home he gave Melody some cheese, bread, and lunch meat because they were soft and easy for her to chew, and she needed to eat something.

On August 10th my dad picked me up from my mom’s while he was coming home from work because I was going to stay with him for the next while. When we got home and let Melody out I noticed that her right eye looked strange. I took a closer look and realized it was nearly swollen nearly shut. My dad called the vet and asked if there was any way we could get in that night, but there were no openings. Rather than going straight to an emergency clinic (because those are extremely expensive) we called other vets in the area and we found one that could take us about an hour from when we called, though they had to get their vet to come in from their other practice.

We got Melody to the vet, and when the vet came in he asked if there was any way for either my dad or I to open her mouth for him to take a look at her teeth, since over the phone we expressed that she was not very good with being handled by strangers. We both said no. My dad can’t because Melody won’t let him, and while on a good day I can pull back her lips, because she was in pain I said that I wouldn’t be able to. So the only way to see inside her mouth was to sedate her.

They did a medium-low dose of the sedative into Melody’s back while I kept her head busy with cheese. The vet left for about twenty minutes, and when he came back to check on how she was doing, Melody was still wide awake and pacing around the room. He said they’d have to do an IV injection this time to be sure it knocked her out, and to do that they’d need to muzzle her. I asked if I could try muzzling her before we had someone try to force it on her face, they said yes, and I got it on her no problem with the help of some cheese. They took her into the back to do the second injection, and when they brought her back in she was already almost out.

The vet checked her mouth and felt around the eye and said he felt no abscesses or tumours or the like. So the problem was most likely that a couple of her back teeth in the right side of her mouth were infected and since the roots of those teeth go up near the eye that's what caused the swelling. He wanted to do blood work on her to see if the infection had spread to her bloodstream, so he did that, as well as an injection of an antibiotic, a pain killer, and a rabies vaccine since she was pretty much due for the vaccine at this point, so why not do that as well, right?

We were given antibiotic pills, painkiller pills, and anti inflammatory eye drops, they gave Melody the reversal for the sedative, and once she was able to walk we were sent on our way, saying that in a day they’d call about the blood work, and in a couple weeks they would probably be able to put her on anesthetic and remove the infected teeth.

Melody wasn't right for the rest of that night. She was woozy and not all there. She fell a couple of times because her back legs completely slid out from under her. I stayed up and checked on her every hour or so that night to make sure she kept breathing.

The next morning all was well. We soaked her food in water until it was mushy and she wolfed it all down! The vet called about the blood work and said the infection was in her bloodstream, so she needed to take another antibiotic as well. They also discovered she was in the beginning stages of kidney failure, which could likely be treated by simply switching her over to a kidney support food for now.

Things started getting better. Melody was taking pills fine, and while the eye drops were a struggle, her eye was looking back to normal. It was obvious her mouth was still bugging her, but that would only be until we ran the course of antibiotics and could have her mouth be operated on.

Tuesday morning (August 9th) I got up and started gearing up to go to work. I tried giving Melody her pills like normal - shove it in a cube of cheese, give her the cube, she’d grab it and scarf it - but unlike normal she very gently took the end of the cheese in her front teeth and tried to work the cheese further back into her mouth. She tried a couple times then spit the cheese wrapped pill back out. I tried again, and no luck. I tried feeding her other things, and every time she’d only take the very edge and try to get it further back into her mouth from there. I watched her panting and she would only open her mouth a very small amount. I called the vet and they wanted to get her in for X-rays on her jaw.

Once both my dad and I were off work we brought her in. She was doing better than she had been that morning, but she still wasn’t wanting to chew. She was sedated again for the X-rays. My dad and I were eventually brought back to the X-ray room to be shown the images. Her jaw looked pretty much normal, though she did have a touch of arthritis in the right joint. He then said he did full body X-rays, and switched to an image of her chest. He pointed out a mass up near her lungs and said that it was a tumour. At this point it’s small enough that it isn’t pressing against her lungs or heart, but we don’t know when it started or how fast it’s growing.

Knowing there’s a tumour in her chest is terrifying, not just because, you know, there’s a tumour, but because it also complicates putting her on anesthetic to have the teeth pulled. If the tumour grows very much by the next time we have an appointment (August 29th, the day before Melody’s 15th birthday) it will be too dangerous to put her on anesthetic because the tumour may interfere with her breathing or heartbeat.

So right now we don’t know what we can do. If the tumour doesn’t grow or only grows a small bit we’re going to try getting the teeth pulled. Of course there’s the problem that she’s very old, so being on anesthetic is already dangerous, and there’s no guarantee that she will be able to come back out of it, even under the best circumstances. If the tumour does grow enough that getting the teeth pulled would be too dangerous, we’ll likely start giving her a more powerful painkiller and just try to keep her happy and comfortable for however much longer she has or until the pain becomes too much for her.