Doggie end of life decisions
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So glad to hear the pup is recovering well. Dogs seem to bounce back from major surgery much faster than we humans do.
As for the Librela...
We had a 17 year old rescue pup with really bad arthritis. Carprofen started to bother his stomach and gabapentin knocked him out completely.
He couldn't get around much at all and we were beginning to think it might be time to let him go. Right around that time Librela became available and we decided to go for it.
The first shot was a miracle. You could tell that he was feeling much less pain and started to move around better. The second shot seemed to take a lot out of him for a few days after the shot, and after the third shot it really hit him hard. Incontinence, stomach upset, and extreme fatigue. Our vet said he wasn't too surprised, as the Librela can affect dogs like vaccines do because of the effect on the immune system. It took several weeks for him to recover from it.
We held off for a couple of months and gave him a fourth shot, and that one hit him really, really hard. About three weeks after the last shot, he had a stroke and we said goodbye.
Lots of people are discussing the side effects of Librela, and any number have talked about neurological and cardiovascular effects they think they've observed. It's a new drug and data on the effects are still being gathered. Of course the dogs that get Librela are typically pretty old, but I can say from what we observed with Raffi, the shots definitely had some pretty challenging side effects. Not sure if it caused his stroke (he was as old as the hills so it might well have happened anyway), but one never knows.
We're not sorry that we tried it because he was at the end of the line before he got the shots. He got some additional good days he wouldn't have had without them. But I think I'd really do a deep dive on what people are seeing in terms of longer term effects as the drug is used more widely. And I would definitely say if the carprofen and gabapentin are working for your dog, I wouldn't switch to Librela.
Fingers crossed that you get good news from the biopsy.
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Really sorry to hear of the surprise bad news, but am hoping for the best from here out. Sorry for the delayed reply, I haven't been online for a few days (yes I do 95% of my TNCR'ing on my desktop). The size of that... wow. My FIL woke up one day about 10 years ago with blood in urine... very long story short, the surgery removed a 15-pound tumor, it was remarkably big. (He had stage 4 cancer, but has survived... almost 10 years of dialysis, kidney transplant, etc).
Speaking of vet costs. One employer I had offered pet insurance, which I thought was great (we have no pets right now), but one could hope that could be more of a norm for employers to add to their benefits package.
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Education is extremely important.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in Doggie end of life decisions:
@Horace said in Doggie end of life decisions:
He’s still doing well today.
No path report yet?
Probably in a week
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@Horace said in Doggie end of life decisions:
@George-K said in Doggie end of life decisions:
@Horace said in Doggie end of life decisions:
He’s still doing well today.
No path report yet?
Probably in a week
Bushwa. How busy are these guys?
Three business days. I can't think of any routine paths we did that weren't knocked out in that time span.
Maybe the animal path pipeline is slower.
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Good news, indeed!
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Huzzah!
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@Horace said in Doggie end of life decisions:
Took them 12 days, but just got the results. No cancer!
yay!!!!
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Thanks everybody!
Found this online:
If you have an older large-breed dog with a splenic mass that has ruptured, the likelihood of this being a benign situation is very low.
Maybe he got luckier than the 33% chance we were cited.
George, the tumor was a hematoma.
Education is extremely important.
