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Fidget Report



 
 
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Old January 11th 04, 07:44 AM
Kevin Michael Vail
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Default Fidget Report

Been a long time since I've reported on Fidget's condition. It's hard
to say, sometimes, exactly what his condition is, though.

We've been working to taper him off the steroids he's been on for quite
a while. Every time we've done it, though, he's stopped eating. He
seems quite happy, very energetic, very affectionate, very "interactive"
as David puts it, but not hungry. This time appears to be no different,
so we're kinda stymied again.

However, Friday night while I was rebuilding David's computer (WinXP--he
got some kind of virus that managed to make even the antivirus software
crash--I gather it hadn't been updated in a long time, so now it's set
to update automatically), Fidget had what appeared to be a seizure...he
just fell over, but then managed to stand up, but was bent into almost a
complete circle, and started walking quickly around the room. He
stopped when he bumped into me, and I just half-held, half-petted him
for a few minutes, and then he came back to normal. This has happened
before when David was around, but this is the first time I've been there
to see it. (David wanted to try to straighten him out, but it didn't
seem like a good idea to me.)

David called the vet we'd been seeing (she had given David her home
phone number and told him to use it, if necessary) and he described what
had happened. Between the two of them, they came up with the following
correlations:

a) The first one of these "seizures" happened right around the time
Toby was diagnosed with cancer, and Fidget stopping eating happened
at the same time.

b) They never happened while he was taking prednisolone (or, later,
methylprednisolone, or, even later, natural cortisone). The
not-eating didn't happen then, either.

The vet told David to immediately give Fidget a cortisone capsule and to
go to an every-other-day schedule until she saw him next week. It now
occurs to her that this might be something like Addison's disease.
She'll schedule tests to check for this; in the meantime, David went to
the Merck's Manual and started reading. He found some correlations
between the symptoms there (even though they were describing people
symptoms) and some odd things we've noticed about Fidget, like a lesion
the vet noticed on his tongue, and put them into an email for the vet.
They'll discuss them next week.

It's possible that his adrenal glands were damaged during the attack
that nearly killed him, and it's taken this long for their functioning
to drop enough to start causing symptoms. It would certainly explain
why steroids help his appetite! While we'd much rather that he turned
out to be completely healthy, at least having some idea of what's going
on means we can do something effective about it.

Fidget's groomer also commented that his coat has changed significantly
since his last grooming. Well, it has--it's growing again, which it
hadn't for months. But it's also drier and feels different. So this is
something to look into, too.

BTW, I cannot say enough good things about this vet. She is the one who
came out when Toby was pts, and we were so touched by her empathy and
consideration for our grief (she unobtrusively left her bill on the
counter and let herself out, meaning we didn't have to deal with
anything but our grief at that point) that when her name also turned up
on a list of possible alternative vets to try for Fidget we immediately
stopped reading the list (given to us by Fidget's "regular" vet). It's
so obvious that she cares not only for the pets she treats, but for
their people as well.
--
Found Poetry (_Science News_, 14-Jun-2003): oldest _homo sapiens_ find
+-----------------------------------------+ ocean eddies' far-flung effects;
| Kevin Michael Vail | superior threads spun
+-----------------------------------------+ the pox from prairie dogs.
 




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