Monday, September 6, 2010

Progress

So since the last post, Santee is doing very well, but Tanka became very ill. She had a high fever that would not break and pain and stiffness in her back legs. She lost a lot of weight as well.
I had blood work done on both Santee and Tanka at City Vet in Long Island City.
http://www.cityvetnyc.com/
I was very happy and impressed with Dr. Adam's open minded and scientific approach. She is a great vet as well as thorough and competent. She is the only vet of 3 that was willing to investigate rather than saying its FIP and sending me on my way.
Both Santee and Tanka had very high white blood cell counts which seems to indicate they are fighting a virus or bacteria infection. They were negative for both FELV and FIV. So we ran some additional tests as one suggestion from a specialist was it may be a tick borne blood parasite such as Lyme Disease. This would cause high fever and joint pain. All tests turned up negative, so while we still don't know exactly what it is, we know more about what it is not!
All organs are functioning well!
They are just fighting something off. So they are on antibiotics for 3 weeks in case its some other blood borne parasite, we can't test for all of them, there are many, common and uncommon. At the same time I have them on immune boosters.
If it is bacterial, hopefully the antibiotics will handle it,if it is viral, its up to them.
See the size difference between Tanka and Teton,
they used to be the same size.
Meanwhile, Tanka seems to finally be recovering! She is starting to play more and eat well. She is using her legs more too. I am letting her out of her crate during the day to play and snuggle with her sisters, she is pretty happy about that!
Before I woke her by grabbing my camera, she was hugging Teton really tight,
it was so cute to see her so happy to be with her sister.See my flickr page for more details, pics and vids!
Hang in there Tanka!
Keep up the good work!