4th November 2016 (morning, before seeing Haggis):
Haggis has become a wee bit of a celebrity dog over the last few years and has contributed lots to lots of people's lives. She dragged her butt around Scotland with me on our 550 mile trip over two and a half months in Scottish winter raising money for charity and is also a Therapet dog who visits vulnerable people in their homes to help cheer them up. She visits charities related to our adventure, has had several TV appearances and generally loves everyone and has lots of Haggis friends and fans!
Last Monday night, however, she poisoned herself by secretly decimating a bin and has been a very poorly doggy ever since. She was very critical and was having repeated seizures so was completely anaesthetised for several days to prevent these causing brain damage. Eventually, she was able to come off the anaesthetic and has been slowly improving over the last few days but her body is incredibly tired and weak. She is being looked after by the amazing staff in the Intensive Care Unit at the Royal Dick Veterinary School in Edinburgh and she needs the help of her Haggis fans to help her get better. A (much) fuller story is detailed below...
By way of an overview for anyone who doesn't know Haggis personally, she is a big, floppy, cuddly, stinky black lab who I re-homed when she was three a few years ago. She was pretty fat and unfit and had huge stress induced alopecia patches on both hips. She was also very under confident and unsure of herself and had not seen any of the world whatsoever! After lots of love and trust building, she came into character, became completely people loving and now has lots of friends through the various things we have gotten up to together. She came to me at a pretty hard time in my life and I feel we have an understanding that we both rescued each other.
Earlier this year where we walked from Gretna Green to Cape Wrath camping out in Scottish winter. The trip took 10 weeks to complete and Haggis managed nearly all of it. Towards the end she was very tired and ended up with an overuse injury in a front paw, meaning that I had to bail her before I finished the last nine days on my own. She tried so hard on the last few days and I've felt closer to her than ever since. The tracker for our route as well as a blog about the first half (I'm still working on the second half!) is here:
After the trip Haggis became a van dog and we toured around everywhere together for six months, before moving into our new house in the country just outside Edinburgh. What has happened this week made me realise that for the last year at least, Haggis and I have been together pretty much 24/7.
Then, on Monday evening, at around 9pm, Haggis started acting strangely, jumping out from underneath the table and acting as though she had a wasp stuck in her fur and it was irritating her. She then started to shake and became very scared and also seemed to be hallucinating. After sitting with her for an hour I rang the emergency pet hospital who advised me to sit with her to see how symptoms progressed or to take her in. Shortly after, the symptoms seemed to subside a little so I decided to sit with her at home, suspecting she had eaten something funny but the effects of which were now passing of their own accord.
By the morning, however, when she took herself out for a wee, and although the stranger symptoms seemed to have passed, her back legs were not functioning properly and she still looked very frightened and confused. We took her into Lamond Veterinary Clinic who advised us to leave her there for monitoring through the day. At this point, there were many suspected causes but we also knew that the previous the evening she had gotten into a bin and as time went on it became the more compelling prognosis that she poisoned herself with something.
Her symptoms were not critical however and at this point the level of concern was reasonable. At 2.40pm, however, she started to have seizure like episodes. Andrew the vet called us to let us know and we went straight in to see what was happening. By the time we got there, she was in a darkened room in front of a fan to cool her high temperature and was having her vitals constantly monitored by vet nurse Gillian as they had been to dangerous levels over the last hour. She had been hyperthermic and had been cooled with wet towels and her heart rate and breathing had also got very high. They had put her on diazepam to stop the seizures so she was now in a half awake state. Each hour the diazepam would wear off and she would start to tremble again and was given another massive dosage. As time went on, the window of effectiveness reduced in length and eventually was not having enough effect to stop her from being subjected to seizing, which was a horrific thing to watch her go through.
We knew we needed to move her as Lamond was due to close at 6pm and would have no staff in after 11pm. We had originally expected to be able to move her to the emergency night time PSDA hospital in Edinburgh on diazapam, but she would now need to be sedated using propafol, a much stronger and more aggressive sedative, meaning that she would need to be accompanied by a medical practitioner and monitored constantly as she would under any anaesthetic situaiton. This was something Lamond had never had to do before and caused a lot of problems, but in the end, Andrew and Gillian decided that Gillian would accompany Haggis in the back of my van to the new hospital and Andrew would follow so that he could take Gillian back to the practise afterwards. They had also both finished their shift at 7pm and were due to work again the following day. They left the hospital in Edinburgh at 10.30pm and still had to travel back to West Lothian and then home before they could sleep.
When we arrived at the PDSA centre in Edinburgh, Haggis was heavily sedated and so the our new vet had not seen the extend of the seizure symptoms until Andrew and Gillian left. Soon after, when she realised how critical Haggis’ condition was, she was concerned as there was only herself plus two vet nurses on shift overnight and she may need to go away for hours at a time to operate if more road traffic collisions came in. By this point, Haggis was coming off the propafol after anything between 5 and 10 minutes and needed constant monitoring and we were having to watch her ourselves and go and grab the vet nurse each time she needed a top up. Apart from Haggis beginning to suffer during these moments, there was the risk that she would hit her head on the wall whilst having a seizure and I would be holding her body down whilst Doug went to get someone for 10 to 20 seconds before the drugs got into her system. There was also the factor that any time being exposed to seizures carried the risk of causing brain damage, so the situation was far less than ideal.
We decided to move her again to the Royal Dick Vet School just outside Edinburgh. Again, Haggis would be accompanied, this time by our new vet and with the vet nurse following. One of the warming realisations that came out of the situation was that as soon as Haggis was travelling in the back of the van, which had been a source of concern due to the effects of any stimulus having the potential to wake her up from the anaesthetic, she seemed much more relaxed and didn’t need a top up for the entire 30 minutes that it took us to get her there, suggesting that she recognised her familiar environment of bobbing around in the van together! Bless her!
When we arrived at the Royal Dick, she was put onto an emergency trolly and rushed off to the Intensive Care Unit. It was now about 1am and having to stop and let her go through the double doors on her own after having watched her every move since 3.30pm earlier that day was difficult.
We were met by Juan Carlos, a hilariously camp, amazingly compassionate and highly entertaining Spanish vet who took us through hall his thoughts about Haggis and extrapolated information from us. He had initially interpreted from the chaos of notes that she had been exposed to seizures over the last four hours and was very concerned that this would almost certainly mean that she would be brain damaged. This, however, was not the case, since we had prevented that by anaesthetising her each time she started to tremble, so the total exposure time to seizures was more like a few minutes, which encouraged him greatly. She also now had one vet and one nurse all to herself as a minimum and often more caring for her. Things felt much better and I immediately trusted Juan Carlos, the staff, the equipment and ICU to be on it entirely.
We were allowed to go see her and left the Royal Dick at around 2pm. Haggis was being kept asleep for a few hours at a time, with short windows of slightly reducing the drugs to see if she would still seizure. By the morning it was obvious that this was to continue and, with the added risk of brain damage given after even just a tiny amount of onset, JC decided to keep her under for a further 24 hours before trying again.
At this point, everything looked very bleak indeed. There was still a strong case for brain damage and at one point she had lost her responsiveness to light stimulus in the eye, which could be an indicator. She had also had a period of exposure to increased blood pressure and constricted pupils, being an indicator of high brain pressure which could also cause damage. Blindness and other nerve damage in her body was also possible. A tracheal tube had been taken out after the first night and was covered in a green mucus, indicating a bacterial infection of stagnant fluids from having no gag reflex and therefore not swallowing whilst in a flattened position for an extended period of time. She was on antibiotics for this, had had diuretics for any brain swelling and was also given some intravenous protective agent that I have never heard of after having black poo, suggesting possible bleeding in the gut. As well as all this, she had been subjected to the aggressive sedatives for a very extended period, which would also stress her organs. For the last two days she has also been clinically anorexic - something I never expected Haggis to be!
Irrespective, there was still a total chance that she could recover and it was a kind of 50/50, or rather, completely unknown prognosis. Impossible to really assess the likelihood of all of the above with Haggis so heavily sedated, the focus was still just to keep her alive and comfortable for long enough that her body could flush out the toxin that was causing the seizures.
