Please Welcome Tommy and Maple!

These two adorable senior dogs arrived together on November 8 from a rural shelter in southern Virginia — the same shelter where Finn had come from. The animal control officer had initially asked if we could take Tommy, on the left. We had agreed to take him when Maple, on the right, came to our attention. We had seen her photo on the shelter’s website — a sad, old, tired looking face staring into the camera. We asked the ACO about her and what her chances of adoption were. “Slim to none,” she replied. With that, we offered to take Maple and figure out what we could do for her.

As it turned out, Tommy and Maple are two of the sweetest, most loving, and most wonderful dogs we have ever taken in. We fell in love with them the moment they arrived. But there is heartbreak ahead.

Here are their stories.

Tommy

Tommy is a Beagle (or possibly a Beagle/Basset cross, given his size and length of body) who was found wandering as a stray. No one came forward to claim him. We don’t know his age except that he is, well, old. He is, sadly, a hospice case.

He is in kidney failure. If that wasn’t bad enough, he has cancer. He also has multiple other growths including a large one on his left rear foot that you can see in the photo above.  That growth interferes with his ability to walk comfortably. He has another large growth around his anus, but fortunately it doesn’t interfere with defecating.

His left front leg bends out at an awkward angle when he stands up. His mouth is a wreck. His ears had chronic infections. He arrived with a urinary tract infection (since treated). Yet Tommy was clearly someone’s house dog. Despite not being neutered, he is house-trained, and he responds to us as if he is used to being loved. He has a beautiful face and expressions that just melt our hearts. But whoever had him did not provide any veterinary care for him.

We took him to our primary care vet for an exam and initial evaluation a few days after he arrived. There are so many things we want to do for him medically, but his advanced kidney disease means anesthesia is out of the question. That means no dental, and more importantly, no surgery to remove the large cancerous lump — the size of a lemon — on his right shoulder. Our vet thinks she can remove that growth on his foot with just a local anesthetic because of the way it is attached to the rest of his foot, so we’re going to be doing that procedure shortly.

I’ve already had a consultation with a board-certified veterinary nutritionist to develop recipes for a home-prepared, kidney-friendly diet. But unfortunately, he’s at the stage in his kidney failure where he doesn’t have a good appetite, so it’s a struggle to get him interested enough in food to get sufficient calories on board.

As a result, we are offering him a rotating menu, morning and evening, to try and entice him to eat as much as he needs to. Cooked ground beef, cooked chicken, treats, a variety of different commercial pet foods (we prefer home-prepared diets but when we get a case like this, we’re not purists — it’s whatever food we can get on board) — we’re constantly trying to get him to eat enough.

Despite all this, Tommy is one very happy boy. He loves his new family and all his new friends.

He sleeps a lot, and can sleep through just about any commotion. (Oh, how we wish we could sleep like that!) When it’s time to take him out and he’s not quite sure he wants to go out yet, he’ll roll over on his side and play dead. Then we have to roll him back over, lift him up and get him on his feet again. Then he’ll head out the door! He’s a character.

Here is a photo I took the day after he arrived:

That is, without question, his favorite place. Sometimes he prefers to be underneath the beds:

We don’t know how much time we’ll have with Tommy, but we’re certainly hoping he’ll be able to spend Christmas with us. He is an absolute treasure of a dog, and we just adore him.

Maple

We think this pretty girl is either a Treeing Walker Coonhound or Fox Hound. She was also found as a stray and of course, with no identification. No one came looking for her. She was emaciated, weighing only 34 pounds. Even after a month at the shelter, she arrived here weighing just 39 pounds. For a dog her size and breed, she should weigh a minimum of 50 pounds. We realized that the photo we saw on the shelter website, where she was looking so haggard, was taken right after she had been found — and that she had been suffering from chronic malnutrition for Lord knows how long.

When she came here just a few weeks ago, we were shocked at how skinny she still was — literally all of her ribs were sticking out. We’ve gotten another five pounds on her, into the mid-40’s, but still have a way to go.

Yes, that’s a diaper she’s wearing in that photo above. When she was picked up as a stray in early October, she was bleeding from her vulva. The shelter vet thought she was just in heat because she was intact. She has very large nipples and must have had a number of litters in her time. But she was still bleeding when she arrived here. Now, heat cycles can last for weeks in female dogs, but we noticed that she was also throwing very large clots as well. We thought that was strange. Fortunately we had a supply of doggie diapers, so we put one on her the night she came.

This is what her diapers look like after just a few hours of her wearing one:

That’s a huge blood clot.

Maple saw our primary care vet at the same visit with Tommy, just days after arriving. This was now a month after Maple had first been picked up, so she had been bleeding for at least four weeks at that point. Our vet looked at the clots and said, “Hmm, that’s not good.” We ran blood work and found that Maple was losing so much blood that she was anemic. Fortunately her body was still producing red blood cells and replenishing enough of them to keep her going. But something was not right.

So the next stop was BEVS, our ER and veterinary specialty hospital in Burlington, where our internal medicine specialist did an abdominal ultrasound, including of her uterus. He found nothing abnormal or that could explain the bleeding. The next day he did a vaginoscopy – inserting a scope through her vulva and into her vagina. There he found a small mass on the wall of her vaginal vault that was oozing blood, along with a large clot that was just kind of floating around. He took biopsy samples of that mass and sent them off to the lab.

Last week the perplexing results came back: just inflammatory cells, nothing cancerous. That was good news, but still frustrating, because we don’t know what’s going on.

Our specialist had us do another round of blood work at our local clinic the day before Thanksgiving, and it showed no further deterioration. I am taking her back to see the internist later this week for more tests and to figure out what our next steps are. A simple spay wouldn’t be sufficient, even though we do want to get her spayed, because that wouldn’t do anything about the bleeding mass in her vagina. Hopefully we’ll know more shortly.

Meanwhile, diapers are the order of the day! Because we change her diapers every time we take her out to the yard to pee, we cycle through these things frequently. We’re always hand-washing them and hanging them to dry on a rack by the wood stove.

Maple, meanwhile, has turned out to be the sweetest, most affectionate dog imaginable. She is an absolute doll. At the shelter she had been described as a “lump on a log,” but we think that was because of her malnutrition and anemia. Now that she’s getting enough nutrition and has gained significant weight, she’s actually energetic and playful. At meal time she whirls and twirls and jumps around in the living room, eagerly awaiting her food.

And for a hound, she is so quiet — in fact, we’ve only heard her bark once! One evening as we were putting the dogs up in their cottage for the night, she saw me heading that way and wanted to go with me. When I disappeared into the building without her, she let out an abrupt bark and then ran to Alayne, who was out in the dog yard. That was the only sound she’s ever made.

We think she’s younger than we or the shelter first thought, though of course we have no idea what her age actually is.

Like Tommy, her mouth is a wreck, too. Our primary care vet described it as “end-stage periodontal disease.” But a dental with our veterinary dentist will have to wait until we can get her chronic bleeding resolved.

Here’s a photo I took when she was in the exam room at BEVS in Burlington two weeks ago:

And this one, when she jumped onto the adjacent chair in the exam room so she could nuzzle me in the ear:

So … two wonderful, loving dogs have joined us at the farm, just in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas!

In fact, we kind of think of these two as … Christmas presents!