Canine Update

Jeff Powell
2 min readAug 23, 2024

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Photo by Alice Donovan Rouse on Unsplash

Well, we’re on a path… of sorts.

Tinkerbelle spent a long time at the vet this past week, and went through a large number of tests. She was shaved, imaged, poked and prodded. And in the end we still know next to nothing about what is wrong with her.

  • The simple infection test and blood tests showed no abnormalities except for her anemia.
  • Her blood work did show that she has no young red blood cells, only old ones, some of which are damaged.
  • Imaging found no cancerous masses but her spleen looked odd.
  • A biopsy of her spleen, however, found no cancer there.

And her anemia continued to get worse, so she was admitted to the ER and given a transfusion, which helped slightly.

The best anyone can figure, she’s got one of:

  • Some sort of bone marrow cancer.
  • Some sort of auto-immune disease.
  • Some sort of infection that isn’t showing up in any of the testing.

Whichever one of those it may be — if it is one of those things — the fact is that for unknown reasons her bone marrow stopped producing new red blood cells a couple of months ago.

Obviously that is not good news. In fact, it’s very bad news.

She had blood work done at her last physical exam, coincidentally about two months ago, and it was normal. What happened? We don’t know, and we probably never will.

So what is happening now? Well, she’s on a steroid, which might kick start her bone marrow to produce red blood cells in some rare cases. In addition, she’s on an antibiotic, which might help with any mystery infection. And finally she got an injection of vitamin B12, again trying to help get her blood production system back online.

If that all sounds very vague and unlikely to help, you’re right to think so. We’re officially in the “clutching at straws” phase of pet ownership.

Her anemia is very serious, and as a result we could lose her at any time. We have another visit to the vet scheduled for this afternoon to get a revised hematocrit number on her, to see if any of the above “treatments” are helping.

And as you might guess, the past week has been a haze of vet visits, phone calls, and waiting. And of course — to top things off — other stories came up last week which are no fun either, but they are not mine to tell.

And that is all there is to share this time. I wish we had better news, but that just isn’t the way things are right now.

Next week may be a doozy. Take care.

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Jeff Powell

Sculptor/Artist. Former programmer. Former volunteer firefighter. Former fencer. Weirdest resume on the planet, I suspect.