My beautiful Airedale had diarrhea for several weeks. I brought her in and they put her on antibiotics for one week. After one week, she still wasn't much better, but showed a little improvement. I as... Read More
My beautiful Airedale had diarrhea for several weeks. I brought her in and they put her on antibiotics for one week. After one week, she still wasn't much better, but showed a little improvement. I asked if she should go on for longer at a higher dose. They said no, we want to do an ultrasound. Before the ultrasound, the vet did blood work. She came back in and said her platelets were very low. Then she took her back for the ultrasound. She came back and said my dog had an enlarged spleen and that they aspirated her spleen during the ultrasound (WITHOUT MY CONSENT). I tried to trust their decision, but I knew aspirating her spleen when she had no platelets was wrong bc platelets are what makes your blood clot. But, never did I expect what would happen to her, next. Never. That night the spot where they had given her sub q fluids bled and bled. I was finally able to stop it by applying a bandage and pressure. But how could I do that on her internally? The aspiration was on a Thursday. They set an appt for the following Tuesday to get the results. I watched my dog go from a dog with diarrhea and some fatigue to a dog who began losing the color in the pinks of her eyes. By Monday morning I couldn't wait any more and I called as soon as they opened and asked them to see her again. Now they were saying she could have cancer (even though the labs weren't back yet) so they did an X-ray but found no masses. They repeated the ultrasound and saw no masses. They claimed the 2nd ultrasound showed no internal bleeding but I was watching my dog's body shape changing as she was bloating outward and watching with horror as the pink in her eyes was becoming more and more pale. They tried giving her a "chemo" drug meant to increase her platelets and gave her several steroids and put her on doxycycline. I was completely overwhelmed with it all and begging them to solve what was wrong. By Tuesday, I knew the spleen was enlarged and now punctured by their procedure and we thought it should be removed. They said they couldn't remove it now bc her platelets were zero. They said she would need a transfusion to do it and we would have to take her to Cornell. We raced her down to Cornell with the Vet's referral. We thought we were going there for a blood transfusion and removal of the clearly malfunctioning and injured spleen. You can't get into Cornell's emergency dept without a Vet referral and Hilton Vet decided to send my dog as cancer patient, even though the cytology from the spleen they punctured was not conclusive. (It should be noted here that several years earlier, this same Vet removed a growth from the same dog's lip and sent it to pathology. They called me then and told me this dog had cancer then, too. Then they called me back a few hours later and said the lab report was very poorly worded and that my dog did not, in fact, have cancer) However, Hilton Vet referred me to an oncologist at Cornell. When we got there, expecting a transfusion and emergency splenectomy, we were sent into a loop of insanity beyond belief as day one, day two, day three passed and Cornell was not taking any steps to save our incredibly sick and dying dog's life. They admitted her into ICU and had her on fluids and fentanyl. They insisted that it would be unethical to remove the dog's spleen if she did in fact have cancer. We told them about the last false alarm when Hilton Vet said our dog had cancer. They asked for the x-rays and ultra-sound images from Hilton Vet. Hilton Vet said the images were not good enough to send. So Cornell had to rely on nothing but a cytology report that came back inconclusive from a lab that had misread my dogs labs before. Now they had to rerun all of her tests. We did not le them do another aspiration of her spleen.The only grounds under which Cornell's oncology drs were willing to do a blood transfusion was for a different diagnostic procedure that offered no life saving ability. They wanted to put her under general anesthesia and drill a hole into her bone to extract her marrow to see if she had cancer. If she survived that, results would not be back for a week. Meanwhile, my dog was getting more bloated and weaker and dying before my eyes. The areas on her that once resembled pink tissue such as the eyes, the ears, were now completely white. After torturing her for 3 days in Cornell with zero life saving attempts made bc we had been sent to an oncology department, we went and picked her up. She never got the transfusion she needed. She never got the splenectomy. She died the next day in our arms, 9 days after getting her "ultrasound" and having a hole poked in her spleen without the platelets to make it clot. Maybe someday, I will find a way to forgive, but it's not today. Read Less