Mortaine’s Blog

I took this quiz earlier today. It evaluates your internal consistencies, philosophically (relating to religion and morality, mostly).

I ran into slight trouble in that I was willing to let people think what they want and then base their actions on that. In retrospect, clearly this is a belief that I only hold in the abstract– when asked specific questions relating to its application, I was inconsistent. My beliefs do not match the abstract. So, I’m willing to let people think what they want, but not to base their actions on their internal beliefs. I think that’s a more fair assessment of what I actually believe, anyway.

It was also a bit hard to take, since the starting premise of about half the questions was “if there is a God” or “something that can be defined as God” and I had to pretty much answer as if I could accept that initial premise as true. Well, I can’t, and therefore my definitions of what is definable as god had to be pretty fricking loose, let me tell ya.

I also found fault with the fact that there is immediate feedback for how well you’re doing. I don’t want to know that I’m internally inconsistent until I’m done answering. The real-time “guy getting hurt” image and feedback was very disconcerting. It’s not like I could go back and change the answer that had caused the inconsistent responses, and it’s not like I was going to change later answers just because something I agreed with earlier turns out to be not as true as I thought. It was a little bizarre, I must say.

BTW: I found the link through , and it was also discussed on User Friendly today. And what is up with people using the UFie boards to send personal messages to their spouses or SOs? What, you people don’t have email or text messaging to communicate? You have to do this on a public board? I swear, the clutter on the UFie boards on any given day is ridiculously huge.

Dr. Hill said that, since they don’t do the procedure, they don’t really know what kind of prognosis there might be. She feels very strongly that there may yet be a cardiac issue– that his cardiac episode was not preceeded by LP breathing. She suggests it may be a strong vagle reaction to positioning him on his back.

I have a call to the vet hospital to hear directly from the surgeon and ask my questions. The vet hospital wanted me to set up a surgical consult, but I don’t want to do that until asking more generally about the aspiration pneumonia risks. Unfortunately, the surgeon won’t be there till Wednesday.

If we decide to go forward on the surgery even with the pneumonia risk (and, to be honest, I am 100% undecided on this one), we’ll do a cardiac ultrasound and make sure his heart is good. If it’s not, then we won’t do surgery, and that will be that. If the heart’s good, we’ll do the surgery and see how well he recovers from it. It is absolutely imperative to me that he have a very high quality of life for however long he may have left. This surgery is… a pretty extreme step that I don’t really want to take unless I’m certain he’ll be okay.

Sigh. This is so hard.

Hammer had a laryngal paralysis episode last night that required immediate veterinary care. Harry had LP as well, but it never got life-threatening. As a result, we knew what we were seeing when Hammer’s tongue turned blue. This happened previously at the vet’s office when he was in all that pain from his toe.

He is still at the animal hospital this morning. They put him out and stuck a tube down his throat to help him breathe.

LP is a life-threatening condition in which the muscles in the throat cease to function very well. It results in the muscles being unable to close fully (patient chokes on his food) or open fully (patient suffocates). It is exacerbated by stress and excitement. Hammer was not stressed last night when this happened, which makes it even more troubling.

We have options, of course. There’s a surgery that can be performed that will permanently open the airway. He’ll never have a breathing episode, but he will be more likely to choke on his food. We rejected this treatment for Harry because it was too much to do for an old dog, who would then get aspirated pneumonia all the time. The vet last night felt that our regular vet’s assessment of how often the aspirated pneumonia occurs was exaggerated. I don’t know.

The surgery runs upwards of $2000, but as surgeries go, it’s relatively non-invasive (just small cut into the neck– nothing huge). This is at the edges of what we can afford; we’ve had one big bill after another for a while now, and it’s adding up to some financial trouble if we’re not a little more careful. Also, if we do the surgery, John pointed out that this could turn into a cycle of “Something else, then pneumonia, then something else big, then pneumonia” every couple of months.

The alternative is to say goodbye and euthanize. It would be pointless to let him continue having these episodes, which are not controllable. Last night’s visit was $500. Four such episodes and we might as well do the surgery. I will not force Hammer to suffer through attack after attack, and I certainly don’t want suffocation to be the way he leaves the world, as it inevitably would be if they continued.

So, I do not really know what to do right now. I need to know what the prognosis for his quality of life really is. I know the emergency vet and the surgeon will tell me the dog would be fine, but they don’t treat these dogs long-term after they’ve had the surgery, the way my regular vet does.