Chapter Fifteen 2006

For Linda, Tova and myself the year was our typical year. That is until early September a month before bird season.
I came home from my primary care physician’s office. As I walked in the front door Linda hollers out from her office, “Take a look at Tova’s head.”

I did exactly that and nearly had a canary. It looked like someone hit her on the left side of her head with a bat. It was shrunk in. Immediately, I called her vet and said I was bringing her in.

As soon as we walked through the door the doctor came out from another patient’s time and took one look at her skull. “Who hit her?” he asks.

“No one. She’s never out of our sight.”

He orders one of this technicians to give her an x-ray and goes back in to finish with his previous patient.

I wait while she is being x-rayed and the other staff members inquire what happened to her. None of us has ever seen anything like this on any dog before.

The doctor looks at the x-ray before he sees me. The technician brought Tova up from the lower level and she is just as spry as she always is. She doesn’t realize that she looks a little lop sided.

The vet comes out and tells me there is nothing wrong with her skull. He recommends that I take her to an internal medicine vet and makes an appointment for me that morning. His technician tells me there is no sign of any tumor on the x-ray. At least that is positive.

Tova and I head for home before going to the internal medicine vet’s office. Linda is anxiously waiting for some kind of word. All I can tell her is we really don’t know and she has another appointment in half an hour on the other side of town.

Tova and I head over to the internal medicine vet’s office. She is young and very perky. You can see how much she loves animals they way she handled Tova. She is going to do blood work, a CAT scan and some other tests that I really cannot remember four years later. What I do remember is she told me they would cost $1,200. So I suggest if you need to go to one you bring your credit card. I paid for the tests and told her to call with the results.

Two hours later she calls and said the blood work shows her liver readings were higher than a dog normally has. She is concerned if she put Tova under for a CAT scan she could have problems with the anesthesia and die. What she recommends we do is an ultra sound instead. I approve the change.

Other than the unusual blood work Tova cleared everything with flying colors. What the heck did she contract?

The next day, I spoke to our regular vet again and he said she is not showing any signs of problems because of her liver. Some dogs are known to have higher readings. I told him what I spent with the internal medicine doctor and still don’t have anything to make any intelligent decisions. I told him I would just wait and see how she is until we find something concrete to make good decisions. I just wanted her to have a good quality of life and at that point, we didn’t know what was going on because she was feeling pretty good.