Please Welcome … Camille!

A Georgia shelter staff member took that photo of our newest arrival, blind Camille, on the morning she left for New Hampshire. It was the first week of January, and this beautiful girl was leaving to start a brand new life in the New Year with us. She certainly deserved it, because her old life was … not kind to her.

She had been turned out to fend for herself — totally blind! — when someone saw her almost get hit by a car. That person stopped, picked her up, and took her to the Gwinnett County animal shelter in Lawrenceville, Georgia. No one came forward to claim her. The shelter named her Camille. She is a Shibu Inu and around 9 years old, they thought … but of course that’s just an educated guess.

She looked emaciated in the photo above. On a body condition score of 1 to 9, the shelter vet scored her as a 3. We were prepared for a skinny little thing to arrive, but it was worse than we thought. Here’s how she looked after arriving here:

We could literally feel every bone her in body. The shelter had cared for her for a few weeks already, so imagine how thin she was when she first got there.

When the driver from Royal Paws Pet Transportation — we highly recommend them, by the way! — arrived early the next morning, he handed her over to us and said, “You know, her poop is really runny.”  As if on cue, I had just put Camille on the ground when she squatted and pooped … and we could tell food was going right through her. We immediately put her on metronidazole when we fed her breakfast that day, and 24 hours later, her system was starting to clear up. (The shelter vet had already dewormed her so that part was done.)

We wondered if her emaciated state could be as simple as the consequence of a long-untreated GI bacterial infection, or whether there was more to the story.

What The Eye Vet Found

A couple of days later I took her to see our veterinary ophthalmologist at BEVS in Burlington. We had already suspected Camille went blind from glaucoma, judging from the shape and large size of her eyes, and sure enough, that was the case. She’d never been treated for glaucoma, so Camille went blind slowly and very painfully. During the progression of the disease, she probably also had uveitis, too — another painful eye condition.

Here she was at BEVS before her eye appointment:

To the left is blind Lillie, who was at BEVS for an echocardiogram and abdominal ultrasound.

Camille’s eyes are black and mottled because she’s suffering from dry eye as well, so she’s getting this leathery pigmentation on the corneal surface. You can see what a mess it looks like here:

The veterinary ophthalmologist prescribed two eye medications we now give Camille twice a day. There’s nothing we can do to restore vision, but at least her eyes are already more comfortable.

And Now Kidney Failure

The next week we took her to our primary care vet clinic for the initial medical exam and blood panels. That’s when we learned Camille is in kidney failure. Our hearts sank.

We wanted more answers — it wasn’t clear if her kidney values alone could explain her emaciation — so we had our clinic send out an expanded tick panel and a GI panel to look for problems like exocrine pancreatic insufficiency (EPI), which could explain her weight loss and loose poop.

Much to our frustration, due to a series of snafus — including the FedEx facility in St. Johnsbury, Vermont sitting on the blood sample for the GI panel for five days, rendering it useless — we still don’t have the results. Alayne just took Camille back to our vet clinic this morning to re-do the blood draws for those two panels.

Hopefully by this time next week we will have a better idea of her underlying condition. If it’s EPI, that would be good because it’s treatable by adding pancreatic enzymes back into her diet. Yet we still have her kidney failure to reckon with.

But we ARE getting weight on her! At the clinic this morning she weighed in at 16.4 pounds, which is a full two pounds heavier than just two weeks ago. That’s pretty significant weight gain in a short amount of time.

We do find that when she is off the metronidazole for several days she starts having loose stools again, so there’s something going on there that we don’t understand.

We’ll be taking her to our internal medicine specialists for an abdominal ultrasound, but we need to have the other test results in hand first.

Meanwhile…

Camille has settled in to her new life here. She gets along with everybody and is (usually) well house-trained. Her bed is in the kitchen, where all good things happen, and yes, we are spoiling her shamelessly! Every night when I’m cooking dinner, she sits right behind me, waiting to see what I’m going to offer her. She’s got a great appetite and likes a wide variety of food. She loves veggies, and whenever I get out the cutting board, she leaps from her bed and heads over to the counter to see what I’m working on. If it’s got a ‘crunch factor,’ she’s all over it.

She is so sweet and so gentle, and deserves all the love we can give her. We may not have much time with her, but we’ll make sure she enjoys it as much as she can.