Luci, the Queen of UTI’s

Last Friday, Matt took the, what I like to call, “geriatric set” to the vet for their annual physical.  Yes, he took BY HIMSELF, Sinatra, Patsy and Luci to the vet.  I would not attempt that, EVER, but he was gung ho about it and I’m not willing to take time off of work right now.  Thank goodness our vet has an “extra large” room with a door right to the outside.  It’s their Emergency room, and I guess there were no emergencies that day. 

Sinatra and Patsy checked out well.  Patsy has kept her weight pretty much the same and Sinatra has dropped a little, but he’s always done that.  He’s like the king of yo-yo dieters.  He’s not at his all-time low, but he will be next month, when Polly comes into heat. 

Then there’s Luci.  We have known for a couple of months that Lu has lost some weight.  She’s always been on the heavier side, her highest at 178 pounds.  We really thought that she had lost 5 pounds, but when the scale came back at 158 pounds, Matt and the vet were shocked.  So came the discussion of what it could be.  Of course, cancer came up along with the side effects of Lyme Disease, which she was diagnosed with last summer.  He ran a bunch of bloodwork and called me at 8:00 pm Saturday night. 

Her liver and the cancer marker (alk phos enzyme) were fine.  But her kidneys are not.  Her creatinine is 2.8 and her albumin is low, which is an indicator of Nephropathy (due to the Lyme).  But he couldn’t make any treatment decisions until he ran her urine.  Matt dropped that off this morning and waited (2 hours with two kids- I give him credit because I wouldn’t have waited there, I would have been home waiting on the vet to call me) for the results in a packed office.  Basically, there was too much sediment in her urine due to a bacterial infection to get an accurate protein level.  Got all that?  We didn’t get the answer we were looking for, which was how much protein is she dumping into her urine.  Matt got a couple of days worth of Clavomax and a script for the rest and we have to redo the urine on July 11th. 

He did advise me to put her on a low protein diet.  We looked high and low yesterday at the dog food store and settled on Science Diet Large Breed Mature.  I think that’s what it is.  We have dropped her protein from 26% to 15%.  He said her appetite may increase.  I guess the higher protein is making her feel worse, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed! 

I call Lu the Queen of UTI’s because this is not the first time we have gone through this.  She went way downhill in 2005.  We came very close to putting her down because she wouldn’t walk.  The vets thought she had meningitis, but in actuality, it was a raging UTI!  Kind of like the time before and before.  She’s very weird the way her body reacts to things because her white count won’t peak until about 48 hours after you know she’s sick.  It’s usually a climbing thing, but with her, she does it with a bang!

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