Twix is sick.....Post from Mom

As many of you know, Twix has had some ongoing health problems for a while.  I haven't updated all her friends lately about her newest issues but she has gotten much worse in the past 24 hours and I need to know if anyone out there recognizes any of these symptoms.

First of all, as has been posted on the blog, she has had blood in her urine for quite some time.  We were under the impression that this was nothing to worry about after seeing a specialist and having a sonogram.  She didn't have any masses or even anything that looked suspicious when we had that done this past summer. The blood comes and goes and other than that she seemed to be just her normal self.

A couple of months ago, she stopped eating her dry dog food and started losing weight.  She usually weighs in the 11 pound range and she had gotten down to a little over 9 pounds.  She would sometimes eat canned food and sometimes she wouldn't and then it got to the point she just wouldn't eat it at all.  We started cooking for her.  Chicken breasts and rice, hamburger and rice, just about anything else that our vet suggested.  Again, sometimes she would eat and sometimes she wouldn't.  It is so hard for me to reach down and hand her a slice of cheese and have her turn her nose away.  She is the dog who will eat anything! We finally realized that she seemed to like sweet things so I started using sweet potatoes instead of rice.  That lasted for one meal.  We started feeding her yogurt and she will eat some of that each day but no more than a half a cup of yogurt per day.  She will sometimes eat some plain chicken or hamburger.  Somehow, she has gained some of her weight back and is now at about 10 pounds. I really don't understand how that is possible since she eats so little but I figure it is because she wasn't eating at all before.

They usually do blood work when we take her in to the vet's office. It will come back normal except for a high white blood cell count so then we put her on antibiotics. When we have the blood work rechecked her white count is normal.  Then the next time the blood work is done (sometimes just a week or two later) her white count is high again. 

She has lost some of her coordination over the past 6 months or so but we had attributed it to her age.  She had started to trip going up or down the stairs.  She was on an anti inflammatory medication but we were concerned that could be affecting her appetite so we took her off of it. When she trips, she may slide down a couple of steps but she never fell and once she got her footing she was able to make it the rest of the way. 

Yesterday, I was at an appointment with my mom and her Daddy was home with her.  Taffy was at the vet recovering from her spay and teeth cleaning.  Twix's daddy had gone to the basement and heard her go upstairs but then heard her fall down all the stairs.  When he came running up to check on her she was standing at the bottom of the stairs dazed.  He checked her over and she didn't seem to have anything wrong other than being dazed.  When I got home she didn't even move off the couch to greet me which is strange. We thought maybe she was a little sore from her tumble.  Not too long after that she started doing this strange jerky thing.  I called the vet and they said we should take her in.  I had this fear that she would stop before we got there due to excitement/nerves.  I took a quick video so that they would be able to see exactly what she was doing.

She is usually quite nervous at the vet's office but yesterday she just stood there.  They checked her over and thought maybe she had a seizure but weren't sure.  They checked her blood work and her white cell count is high again.  While we were waiting for her blood work to come back, she fell asleep in my arms, belly up, like a baby. She would NEVER have done that before. And she was totally out, almost hard to wake. Once I put her down, she was stumbling when she walked and if she stood still she would lean forward to the point that her hind legs would start to lift off the floor before she would catch herself.

Today, she seems the same. Not really much change at all except maybe the head jerk isn't quite as often.  We are taking her back to the vet tomorrow for a follow up.  Dr. Abby wasn't there when we went yesterday but will be there tomorrow.  She has been telling us for a while that Twix definitely has something wrong but her symptoms are very vague and we are having a hard time pin pointing it.  These new symptoms almost seem neurological.

I was hoping maybe, just maybe, someone out there has seen this same thing with one of their dogs or might have a clue of what is going on.  She has totally lost her spark and it breaks my heart to see her like this:

On another note, at my mom's appointment yesterday they decided to postpone her transplant.  The second biopsy came back as leukemia OR a reaction to something going on inside her body.  They don't want to do the transplant on Monday until they have concrete answers.  The doctor said he is sure she has the Leukemia from her blood work and symptoms but it is his job to leave no stone unturned prior to doing the transplant.  So, they will be getting the slides from her first biopsy and comparing them and if the pathologist still isn't sure they will either perform another biopsy and/or send the slides to Mayo Clinic. They said it will probably be a month or more before we proceed.

Thank you for your prayers and power of the paw!

Please feel free to link to this post.
I feel like the more who read it the better the chance someone might recognize what is happening.