Gunner's Battle with Lyme-By Kiara Hebert

                                                      

                                                This is Gunner

Sunday, February 16th was when we noticed something was wrong with Gunner. Before we left for church, he was his happy normal self. I remember that morning he had jumped on my bed and woke me up, acting crazy as he usually is in the morning. When we got home from church, we noticed that he wasn't at the door to greet us like he always does. When we called him, he came from the upstairs, and as he was walking down the stairs, we noticed that he was limping. We didn't think much of it though, we just thought that maybe he had hurt himself playing in the snow with his sister, Patience. A couple hours later, he was limping even more, and it was getting harder for him to walk. By bedtime, he couldn't walk up the stairs, so Dad picked him up and brought him in the room to go to bed. The whole night he was whimpering and crying. By morning, he could hardly walk, so Dad had to carry him down the stairs. It was hard trying to get him to go outside to go to the bathroom. When we let him out, he would just sit on the porch because it hurt him to much to walk.

As the day went on, he was getting worse. He wouldn't eat and hardly drank. Later in the afternoon he was completely lame. If you tried touching his front paw, he would yelp and pull it away. He felt hot and feverish.

Mom called our vet, but we couldn't get an appointment until the next day. That evening, his back legs started hurting him. At around 8:00, he was so bad that we  took him the emergency vet hospital. We had a hard time trying to get him in the car. Every time we'd try to move him, he would yelp and cry.

After we finally go him in the car, we drove to the emergency vet which was about 30 minutes away.

  
When we got to the emergency vet, they brought out a stretcher and carried him in to the examination room. After we signed in, we waited in the waiting room for about two hours, then they asked us if they could do a Lyme and other tick borne illnesses test. Later we were told that Gunner had Lyme disease and another tick borne illness called Anaplasmosis, which is very common in dogs. They wanted to do a blood test on Gunner, as Anaplasmosis will  cause kidney failure in dogs if not caught fast enough. The blood test came back with good results, we had caught the Anaplasmosis fast enough before it affected his kidneys. They injected a round of doxycycline and gave us a weeks worth of pills to give him. We brought him home, and that night Mom and I slept in the living room with him. In the morning we brought him to his normal vet, where his doctor gave him a checkup and his second dose of doxycycline. They kept him until late afternoon.

When we picked him up, he was walking very slowly, but he still needed help to stand up.  That evening, he would go outside with me and walk around, and was definitely feeling better,  but he still was not normal.

The next day, he could stand up a little on his own, and would eat a little. 

Later, he was doing much better.

A week later he was perfectly normal. You would never have known that he was so sick the week before. He was on Doxycycline for three weeks and recently took his last dose.