Fred Update

Medical issues:  Large tumor on rear leg.  Seizures.

We had Fred in rescue for at least a month or two before he started having seizures.   He was started on 60mg of phenobarbitol, twice a day beginning a month ago.  This seemed to be working fine until this past week when he started having breakthrough seizures.  Off to the vet he went.   Bloodwork was due anyway.  Unfortunately, his bloodwork came back with a low BUN, which can indicate liver disease/failure so a new test was ordered to see what’s up. ( A blood urea nitrogen (BUN) test measures the amount of nitrogen in your blood that comes from the waste product urea.)  While at the vet he had another seizure so his meds were increased.  Now we wait.  And hope.  The good news is the liver test came back normal today…yay!

We have been trying to get a plan together for this boy since we took him in because he needs to have that tumor removed from his hind leg.  In the background, we were lining up a specialist in Charlotte, NC so we needed a foster for him to go to.  Enter Brenda, a new foster for us!  She has beagles and is close to our other NC volunteers…perfect!  Now all we needed to do was move him.  Since Fred had just started having seizures we decided we better first get this under control.   We were almost to the point of stability on the meds when he came down with kennel cough.  Brenda has other beagles and the last thing we want to do is carry an infection to a new home.  Sigh.  Sorry, Freddie…we’ll have to wait until you recover!  We even had our two wonderful fosters working together to arrange to meet each other half way.  Hazel & Ed have Fred in West Virginia and Brenda is in NC.  We have the best vols!

The current plan is to let Fred stabilize on his new increased dose of phenobarb and then move him to have that tumor evaluated.  He will need surgery to have it removed, but more importantly we need to biopsy it to see if it’s cancer and if so, what type.  We’re hoping this will be an easy fix for him!