Poor doggy

Poor Izzie came in heat today.  She was long overdue, supposed to happen in June.  So she is wearing a diaper for the next month.  

I would have had her spade last spring but she had all sorts of health problems.  She started having nose bleeds in October.  It was very dramatic as my friend Ona will remember. She was diagnosed with a sinus infection and allergies. Shortly after that we moved from Texas to Alabama. The nose bleeds got worse and worse.  I will not get graphic but I had to lock her in the laundry room and suffice it to say the walls of that room got scrubbed more than twice.  We then spent over $600 sedating and taking xrays of her head to find nothing.  Switched vets.  In November the new one took her blood pressure.  It was 220/120.  (It is supposed to be like a human around 120/80).  So from there they tried to find out why it was so high.  An EKG and chest xray showed a super huge heart.  She went on medicine twice a day for the blood pressure and the nose bleeds stopped. 

We went away for Christmas and boarded her at the vet's office.  When I picked her up she had a huge abscess on her forehead.  It seemed that she got bit, but they don't let the dogs mingle.  It was mysterious.  The vet felt so bad that they didn't even notice the pus-filled lump on her head until I was picking her up that he treated it for no charge.  She seemed to get better. 

Then in April I noticed that her palate on top of her mouth was swollen.  By the time she got into the office for surgery on it it was bulging down below her teeth.  That was April 26.  A very bad day because not only did I take her in, but two close family friends passed away that day.  The next day it got worse.  The tornadoes plowed through this part of the country and devastated the community.  Izzie was at the vets because she had two teeth removed due to the bone in that part of her face being eroded and all sorts of nastiness still draining from the sinus it created.  The entire north Alabama area was without power and so I had no way of being in contact with the vet.  I did go there a couple of days and left a note on the door and they responded in kind.  Because of the storms and power outage it took more than a week for the tests to come back telling what antibiotic would work on the infection. The vet and I actually had a conversation about putting her to sleep because she wasn't getting better. Then the results came back that she had been on the wrong antibiotic.  Once she got on the right one she started to get better.  In all, Izzie was at the vet's for 17 days and I couldn't see her during that time because she might think that she was coming home if I went to visit and that would have been mean.  Dr. Wilson was awesome and only charged me half of the bill and Izzie actually is excited and happy to go to their office, even after being tortured there.  She is such a sweet, crazy dog.  The vet told me that if I had decided to stop treatment that he would have tried to save her anyway and one of them would have taken her.  Thankfully it all turned out okay and we have our family pet still.  Oh, and we still aren't 100 percent sure of what happened.  It seems she may have been bit even before I got her in June, and the abscess would recede every time she went on antibiotics. The infection led to the large heart and high blood pressure and that is what causes the nose bleeds.  Any ways, in short, she will be going back for another surgery in about a month, to be spade.