Billy - lyme disease
(Response to thread about stoic animals)
Damn. My Billy was that way. He didn't seem to
react much to pain. I was freezing in the snow
one day up in the Sierra and wondering why I had
thought the hike would be fun, when I heard
something splashing, and saw that Billy had
broken the ice on the surface of a little pond
and was swimming around in the snow slush,
chewing on ice. The water was so cold it would
have stopped my heart if I'd fallen in, but he
thought it was fun.
My buddy.
Even when he had the Lyme disease, and couldn't
even walk, or lift his leg to pee, he didn't
complain unless I picked him up wrong or the
doctors who didn't know what it was, but kept
insisting there was no Lyme in California shined
a flashlight in his eyes. That seemed to hurt a
lot. When I stopped listening to them and gave
him my Doxycycline ... I had caught it, too ...
which the UC Small Animal Teaching Hospital
wouldn't prescribe because they said it hadn't
been tested on dogs, his fever went down from
105.6, he could walk in 24 hours, and was
symptom free in 48. He was almost ten then ...
they told me he was an old dog and didn't seem to
think he was worth spending any resources on, but
he lived another ten years and enjoyed every day
of it until the last night.
Have they have found out that Doxycycline kills
Lyme bacteria in dogs yet? Damned little things
were really resistant. I got the infectious
diseases specialist at Kaiser to go along with me
on an experiment, because every time we came off
it, the symptoms came back, fever, joint pains
and all. I told him we might be creating a super
resistant strain because it took more antibiotic
each time, so we hit them with Doxycycline for
two weeks, then without skipping a beat, switched
to Minocycline for two weeks, then when the
little bastards were on their knees, carpet
bombed them again with Doxycycline, back and
forth for several cycles, and that finished them
off.
Billy had to take Prednisone for the rest of his
life, but I weened him down to a very small dose
to escape the side effects as much as possible
and didn't have to raise it until his last year.
... Doug