IMHA is a dog killer

Originally posted on 3/10/11
This is the last picture of Buster...our very much loved dog who was only 5 years old. This was last Saturday when everything was fine. About 9 hours after this photo, he wasn't himself anymore and never came back. We went on a two mile walk at the new Meramec park along the Meramac River in south St. Louis County. As you can see we made it one mile before the flooding forced us back...so 2 miles with Buster pulling and jumping and being his energetic self the whole way. Later Saturday night about 10:30 I walked him another mile and he was totally normal. At midnight, right before bed I let him out, but when he came back in he wouldn't eat his treat...so we knew something was wrong...he was really sick looking...so we let him sleep in our room with us to keep an eye on him...he didn't move the whole night, next morning (Sunday) he was looking like death so we brought him to the emergency vet...they diagnosed him with IMHA...a horrible auto-immune reaction which destroyed all of his red blood cells and platelets...it might have been a reaction to his vaccines he just got on Wed, but who knows for sure. What is really horrible for us it that Teddy had something like this when he was born...so when the vet said it was complicated and tried to explain platelets etc and auto-immune disorders, we stopped her and told her we knew too much about it already. What is shocking is how this typically comes on instantly and is deadly the majority of the time...it especially attacks dogs in the prime of their lives. So, enough technical stuff, we are all just really in shock and devastated...we've had a run of bad luck since about December and this was just what we didn't need. We've been struggling with Teddy's seizures since December, which of course affect his behavior negatively, then we controlled the seizures with Zonegran, but it had terrible behavioral side effects...so just this week we switched to a new med called Banzel....hopefully that will somehow work out. Finally, Sue wrote a lot better story about Buster on her blog.