He got castrated and radiographed last week (April 28th) and Doc said that his hips look great! He was "very pleased" with the x-rays. I hope we can get copies again. Dr. Ross says that we are to gradually up his activity over the next couple weeks until he's at full strength, but other than that, he's perfectly fine. So within the next 2-3 weeks, he'll be allowed to run, jump, play and swim all he wants! We're already treating him to long walks and romps at the park, and playing in the surf at the lake. Yay! What great and wonderful news.
BUT...we also had them do some blood work, since we hadn't given him his heartworm meds in a while. Glad we did...because Otis is Lyme positive. Sigh. Another adventure, I guess.
Apparently, Lyme disease comes from ticks, especially deer ticks. They're tiny--like no bigger than the head of a pin. And they love to live on mice, rabbits and deer. We have multitudes of all three around our house. Go figure. We have never found a tick on him, well, not since last November, but apparently there was one at some time. Lyme is a bacteria and causes fever, lethargy, lack of appetite and limping/sore joints (great, huh?). It can also cause acute pain and kidney failure. We've caught him limping here and there and having trouble standing every now and then and that's probably why. So here we were scared about his hips and some of the limping may have been due to the Lyme. Craziness.
Treatment is pretty simple. Antibiotics twice a day for a month. He'll be retested in September to make sure he's "Lyme-free". If so, we'll get him the Lyme vaccine. Should help some. In the meantime, we'll be treating him with both frontline and interceptor and hoping for the best. Would use Advantix, but apparently it's toxic to cats.
Guess our little journey will go on a bit longer...
No comments:
Post a Comment