Thoughts on ... Canine Renal Disease

I hesitate to write this post - while the blog is meant to journalize experiences, and is certainly personal, once I make this entry I'll have started down a path revisiting this topic until a final post sometime.

(May 2009 update: Gracie is still with us and doing well. If you are finding this post from a search engine, click the "canine renal" label below for follow-up posts. My wife has put together a series of posts on our experience dealing with the disease, and they are in the process of being published - clicking the label will take you to them.)

(August 2009 update: Gracie is still with us. We are managing the canine renal failure, which requires quite a bit of prescription medicine, careful attention to diet, and plenty of vet care. Knowing that she has this condition keeps us attentive to subtle changes. It can be expensive; we're very lucky to have the resources to manage this. If you click the "canine renal" label below, you'll be able to resource a good 15 to 20 posts on the topic.)

(September 2009 update: We had to put our beloved Gracie to sleep on September 7. Given time, we'll add a few more, backdated posts about our final few visits to the vet, and the care we were giving her at the time. She was a real trooper through it all. We were very lucky to have had so much time with her, and we all - Mary, me, and Sofie Dawg, miss Gracie very much.)

This week we learned that Gracie is very likely in chronic renal failure, which means her kidneys aren't clearing all the toxins from her body. She has progressed from a mild stage of the disease which was diagnosed last Fall. About three weeks ago, she started boycotting her food, and we thought, okay - she really doesn't like the food (a special diet we had been treating the early stage with), and the battle to try and get her to eat it isn't worth it.

So we went to the vet for alternatives. In the meantime they tested her again - she lost 5 pounds over the last month and although she was always pushing it on being just a tad overweight and this brings her in line with typical border collie weights - it was an abrupt loss and concerned us.

We found another version of the food (wet - of course - the previous one was dry), and the vet confirmed that her condition had progressed in a positive direction yesterday. This dog is still a nut, driven like the border collie she is, constantly trying to tempt us with her toys, as always. She even tried to convince a Page County Deputy to play football with her over the weekend!

But the simple matter is she is 14 and her body is starting to wear out. Stage 2 renal failure is the final stage, and the vet tells us it could be weeks (! given the spirits she is in this is hard to believe) but it could be months. In any case, the news was that it is likely that we'll lose her this year.

She's been with us a long time and we've been blessed to have her by us over the years - she's been really special to us the whole way. And meanwhile, Sofie the Chow Mix still amazes everyone, thanks to her hybrid vigor!