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Adam
was a striking dog and like all of Nancy Garcia's Aussies, he lived
a pretty good life on her new Texas ranch, with plenty of room to
run and be a dog. One of his favorite places to loll on a hot
day was under that tree you see up there. He's buried under it
now, a victim of tick disease.
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for
Adam
and
for Thunder
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Texas
has more than its share of ticks and sometime, somewhere, Adam ran
up against one that was carrying Ehrlichiosis. It's a stinking
awful disease that destroys a dog's immune system, attacking the
spinal marrow where the white blood cells which fight sickness are
made, crippling them and making it impossible for them to replicate
correctly. It's always fatal if you don't catch it in time and
hit it as hard as you can. But it's easy to miss the early
symptoms which may last a couple of weeks at most, or just pass them
off as the dog being off his feed for a while, down in the dumps, a
little feverish, nothing to worry about. Of course, that's
when it's most curable. After a while, that passes and the dog
will seem pretty much as always as the Ehrlichiosis settles into the
second stage. The second stage may last several years while
the immune system remains in an uneasy standoff with the disease.
Then at some point the disease becomes chronic, the outlook becomes
pretty grim and death can come without warning.
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Nancy
had no idea her young dog was sick until one afternoon around five
o'clock, Adam began to act as if he didn't feel well. By
midnight, he was so ill that she routed her vet out of bed, carried
Adam to the truck and drove the thirty odd miles into Falfurrias to
meet her vet at the clinic. They worked over him until two in
the morning when he died. From the onset of sickness to his
last breath was that fast. Well, it seemed like it; it wasn't
really. Her vet told her that Adam had contracted Ehrlichiosis where
she had been living some time before and, because it went
undiagnosed, it killed him.
Nancy
was sick with grief when she told me about it and I ached for her,
but I really had no idea what she was talking about. So,
because I wanted to understand, I headed for Google and did a search
that led me to a site on tick disease called Ehrlichiosis: a Silent
and Deadly Killer. I didn't expect to find my own dog
described on that page. You can find a link
to that site on Ehrlichiosis on the page that may have brought you
here.
You
can believe that reading what I did there, seeing my own dog in so
much of what was described, hit me like a sledge hammer. There
was no doubt in my mind "at all" that my dog had tick
disease after I read that page. I'd been going nuts wondering
why my dog's mange had grown progressively worse for more than a
year despite one attempt after another to stop it, including being
hit twice with Ivermectin in doses much larger than those used for
heartworm prevention; why he became hypothyroid, developing the
fairly rare, "tragic face" along with the rough, blackened
elephant skin that is a dead giveaway of that condition. To be
told that my dog had a "compromised immune system" was
like being told he was sick when that was already self-evident.
I wanted a reason why nothing we did was any help and now I had it.
Tearing off to my vet with a printout of the information on that
site was nothing more than going for official confirmation of what I
already knew. At last, we had something to fight.
Well,
we lost, Thunder and I. His disease, exacerbated, abetted, by
the harsh treatments used to eradicate mange, had reached the stage
where nothing helped. He'd gone too long without a diagnosis
and when he was two months shy of his third birthday, I put him
down. It was the hardest thing I've ever done.
If
it hadn't been for Adam, I'd never have known what destroyed my
beautiful, strong dog and trapped him in a very old dog's body,
leaving smears of blood on anything he brushed up against because he
was bleeding through his skin. It's a gruesome thing to
imagine, worse to see in a dog you love.
Well,
I'd rather have remained in ignorance about tick disease forever and
still have both my dogs with me. But since I don't, since I
hate the thought of anyone else going through the drawn-out pain of
watching a dog get sicker and sicker and be powerless to do
anything, of seeing a dog you thought was healthy suddenly sicken
and die, as Nancy did, I've put these pages on tick disease up here.
If you need them, I hope they help. If you don't, I hope you
never do.
One
last thing I have to say: if your dog ever developes
demodectic mange, don't think of those mites as the enemy.
Think of them as red flags that something is wrong and don't rest
until you find out what it is. Mange mites don't spread unless
something clears the way for them.
Gil.
Ash
for
Adam and for Thunder
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