January 2006 = Canine Distemper

If by chance you landed here looking for info on Canine Distemper, I'll include some useful links at the bottom of the post. First my story about the disease from hell.

The picture is of Francis, Zita and Morgan(the puppy).

We got 2 "rescue puppies" as a Christmas present for our daughters. Almost as soon as we got one home, we noticed blood in the stool of one of the dogs. We went to the vet and she was diagnosed with Kennel Cough and tapeworms. She was also dehydrated so was given some sub-cutaneous fluid. We got some antibiotics and some worming pills.

She appeared to recover somewhat, and we took both puppies to a vet for the "Free" vet check that comes with a rescue dog. The vet changed antibiotics and said the dogs were doing pretty good and not to worry. We have since changed Vets....but that's another long story.

One of the dogs was the dominant female of the litter, the other was the runt of the litter. They were both really fun puppies, the smaller one was a real lap dog. Very Sweet. They both seemed to know we rescued them from the "Gas Chamber".
They both had a cough and very loose stools. (YUK!!!). Anyhow we thought we were nursing them back to health. On the 12th of January, the smaller one had some sort of seizure. Samantha began to search the internet and found out about Canine Distemper. The symptoms matched exactly, even with the "Chewing Gum Seizures". These are where the dog appears to be chewing gum. She also found that the disease has about a 50% mortality rate in dogs, and up to 80% in puppies....

We brought the puppy to a new vet and found out that she had "Raging Pneumonia". We changed antibiotics again. Since distemper is viral, the antibiotics are mainly to treat pneumonia and other secondary infections. The new antibiotics were $10 a pill generic price. We also started her on phenobarbital to control the seizures. This seemed to work, for a while. After about a week, the seizures came back with a vengence. Samantha and I were up all night with the puppy. I had a real bad feeling the dog's days were about up. Thankfully, I went to work that day. The dog got worse and after many conversations, discussions with the vet, we had poor Morgan put to sleep. Samantha held the dog the whole time, and it was an incredibly sad day. Morgan was a real sweet dog.

Well, the other dog (Abby), was still sick but had not had any seizures. So we kept up with the antibiotics, special diet, etc.... About a week after Morgan died, Abby had a seizure. Rebecca woke us up to tell us. We had been somewhat concerned because Abby had been acting real sluggish the night before. DAMN!!!! Going through the distemper death march again was not anything we wanted to think about. It was very draining. Physically draining because we had to give the dog her medicine every 6 hours ....around the clock. It was pretty tough seeing the kids that upset for a long period of time. ...And yes, I felt pretty bad about the dog too....

Anyhow, we got Abby on phenobarbital the next day. The initial prognosis did not appear to be good, but we decided to fight it out. A wierd thing with the phenobaribital loading dose was the dog got real hyper and didn't sleep much for the first few days. Those were long nights. Abby seemed to get better, she had only one more seizure. She is now off antibiotics. We still have to give her her anti-seizure medicine for how long no one knows. She seems to be back to a normal, hyper puppy. When comparing her to how lethargic she was a month ago, we can really tell how sick she was.

When Abby was really sick, we fed her almost exclusively Hill's science diet a/d. This really supports the dog's immune system.

So anyhow, that's my January 2006.

If you have a puppy with distemper, good luck with the fight.

Here's a few good links on distemper:

http://www.vetinfo.com/ddistemper.html

http://www.animalhealthchannel.com/distemper/