A Maddy Update

This is just little update on Maddy…after a rough 2017, we had high hopes 2018 would be a great year for her!

Be still my heart!

On January 6, she had her follow-up appointment from her back surgery at the neurologist's office and since everything looked great, she was "released" from their care, which is exactly what we had wanted to hear!

We noticed over the next several weeks that she was drinking a lot of water. All the time. So much water that sometimes we had to shoo her away from the water bowl. This is a classic sign of Cushing's disease, which is caused by excess cortisol in the body. This had actually been our concern last summer when all of her health troubles began. In the course of figuring out what was wrong, we not only discovered a tumor on her right adrenal gland, which could possibly explain some of what she was going through, but also a tumor on her spleen, which ended up taking precedence because there was a significant risk of it rupturing. So the surgeon removed her spleen in August, and it took her quite a while to recover from that ordeal.

After she was back to herself, we thought things were fine until she suddenly wasn't putting weight on her front left paw and ended up having back surgery in November to deal with disk degeneration. Honestly, the poor little dog! However, the recovery from the back surgery could not have gone more smoothly, and seeing how pleased the neurologist was with Maddy's progress on January 6, we were very optimistic.

Until the excessive drinking began.

We made an appointment with our regular vet and my mom kindly took Maddy to that appointment for us. Dr. T. has been Maddy's vet since we adopted her from Dachshund Rescue of North America in 2009 and we ADORE her. She's the greatest vet in the world as far as we are concerned and she has taken care of not just our seven pups but my mom's five dogs and my brother's dog as well. So when she told my mom that she was not comfortable managing Maddy because of how complicated her case was, we knew we'd be dealing with specialists for her from this point forward.

We took her back to the internist who cared for her last summer, and we ended up having a very serious conversation. An ultrasound revealed that not only did she still have that tumor on her right adrenal gland – no surprise there – but also that her left adrenal gland has atrophied. Not good news. The only positive thing we heard was that the tumor had not spread to her vena cava, which could have severe potential consequences.

So now we are looking at more surgery for this happy, beautiful little soul to remove her right adrenal gland in the hopes that Cushing's Disease will no longer be something she needs to contend with. If the surgery is a success, she will be on medication for a little while to kick-start her left adrenal gland into doing its job.

Right now we are waiting to see what the surgeon says about when Maddy will be a good candidate for surgery – they are running some tests to see if she needs to be on medication prior to surgery to stabilize some of her numbers or if we are just going to go ahead with surgery in the very near future.

Please keep our gal in your thoughts!

Using Ginny as a pillow!

Happy Tails to you!