The Hiro's Journey; Blog; Heartworm; Heartworm Treatment; Heartworm Recovery

The Hiro’s Journey, Part 3–Time For A Break

We have made it through 28 days of twice daily doxycycline in preparation for Heartworm treatment, and now we have a month-long break before the next phase in the treatment plan. This antibiotic pre-treatment we just completed targets a strain of bacteria harbored inside the heartworms, Wolbachia. The loss of this symbiotic bacteria is not going to be enough to kill the heartworms, but we hope that they will be weakened, and as a result, more likely to succumb next month when we administer the treatment intended to kill them, melarsomine dihydrochloride. Eliminating as much of the Wolbachia as we can now may reduce the chance of Hiro experiencing dangerous complications in the next stage of treatment.

Hiro’s nails have grown long, and he misses his exercise. He has an assortment of chew toys designed for dogs twice his size to keep him occupied, but he’s still like a kid without recess. He cries when I put on my running shoes and leave without him. He used to inhale his food, but now, he takes a mouthful a a time and drops it on the floor to inspect it–he knows I’ve been giving him medicine all this time and he’s looking for it!

Sometimes, I used treats, such as Pill Pockets or Pill Buddies to give him the medicine, but he caught on to that and I had to watch him closely to make sure he didn’t spit out the pills. I found that what worked best was to smother the tablets with peanut butter and smear them on his tongue-he became so interested in licking the remaining peanut butter from my fingers that he seemed not to notice that he would have to swallow the pills to get it.

He has been experiencing a couple of side effects from the antibiotics. I noticed some burping/reflux, but the most obvious was his reduced appetite, which led him to actually share his food with his brother:

…..Or just let him have it:

Hiro eventually overcame his shame and started chasing the cat away from his food after a couple of days…not that he needed another reason to mercilessly pester his elderly cat brother.

I expect that Hiro’s appetite will return to normal in a few days, but really, it’s probably fine for him to eat a little less, now that he is sedentary–he’s getting a bit portly.

All things considered, Hiro is doing pretty well–he doesn’t know that he’s sick yet, and we’ll try to keep it that way as long as we can.

The Hiro’s Journey II–Hiro – Regular Exercise = Destruction

We “officially” kicked off Hiro’s Heartworm treatment plan a few days ago, on August 28th. Last week, he had a chest X-Ray done so that the vet could look for signs of damage to his heart and lungs before she could determine how to proceed with treatment.

Thankfully, his heart and lungs still look fairly healthy, with some minor changes/damage noted to the surrounding blood vessels. Some dogs need to have a course of prednisone along with antibiotics prior to the actual adult “wormicide” treatment. The prednisone helps reduce inflammation and the antibiotics weaken the worms and thin the herd of harmful bacteria that live inside the worms. Because Hiro’s heart and lungs did not appear to be too inflamed on the X-Ray, we are moving forward with a month of doxycycline (antibiotic) only.

It took me 3 tries to get him to take 2-1/2 tablets the first day–they must taste awful. I have since found that coating the pills in peanut butter or putting them in a Greenies Pill Pocket makes this much easier–Hiro used to inhale food and sometimes non-food items indiscriminately, but since I once spiked his food with doxycycline ONE TIME, he no longer trusts me and eyes every meal with suspicion….

The hardest part of this is the exercise restriction. He doesn’t realize that he’s sick and doesn’t understand why I go for walks and runs without him now. He whines every time I put on shoes or anything with long sleeves. I went to lift weights the other day and closed the gate on the landing at the top of our stairs, so that I could try to get a workout done without his “help”…..

After he finished pouting, he decided to channel his energy into destroying the TV remote:

He has so far destroyed 2 of these, and I have had to rescue the third remote from him a couple of times before he had a chance to really dig in to it. He watches us like a hawk now, hoping against hope that we leave the surviving remote within his reach…..He loves his Kongs, but they don’t give him the satisfying crunch of destruction, or quite this variety of delightful textures….

So far, we’ve got this–I just need to find something that is more entertaining to him than destroying the remote control…..for the next several months.

The Hiro’s Journey, Part 1: Heartworm Positive

The Hero’s Journey: In narratology and comparative mythology, the hero’s journey, or the monomyth, is the common template of stories that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed. (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey)

Yesterday, I got one of those calls from my dog’s veterinarian that nobody wants to get: My 1-1/2 year old rescue dog that I adopted six months ago, that I have since come to love to pieces, and that needed a Heartworm-Negative test in order to travel to the rescue from which I adopted him, has tested Heartworm-Positive.

If he previously tested negative, and has been on a preventative for several months, how could he be positive now?

Hiro came from Louisiana, an area where mosquito season is “year round” and mosquito-borne illnesses are rampant in dogs as a result. It turns out that heart worms take 6-7 months to mature and be detectable on a test. He tested negative for heart worms 3 months before I adopted him, and I started him on Heartguard within a month of bringing him home. Unfortunately, Heartguard does not kill worms that have reached a certain stage in their juvenile development, nor does it kill adult worms, which can grow to a foot long and live for a whopping 5-7 years!

What Heartguard can do, however, is kill larvae, protecting the dog from infection resulting from new mosquito bites, and preventing the offspring of existing heart worms from surviving.

I knew when I adopted this dog that he would need to be re-checked for heartworms due to the above, but the most upsetting thing about this is that I did not notice any symptoms that he was unwell.

I had been taking him running with me all summer, easily 3-5 miles at a time. In hindsight, however, I did notice that sometimes he would want to slow down and walk for awhile. At first I thought that he was just hot, or flattered myself in thinking that maybe my fitness level was improving….but now I recognize that this was more likely “Exercise Intolerance”, a symptom of Heartworm infection.

This dog has also been amazingly well behaved and calm for such a young dog, too…..all this time, I thought that I must be an awesome dog mom and handler/trainer and that he must really like living with us….but it turns out that his heart and lungs are infested with worms that are sucking the life out of him, which explains his unusually calm and compliant disposition. Low Energy/Lethargy are additional symptoms of heart worm infection.

Hiro’s veterinarian very patiently explained the treatment plan, advised that it will take several months and a number of different drugs to evict these parasites, and gave me an upfront estimate that this treatment typically costs around $1500 all-in.

Hiro has to be kept as calm and quiet as possible, now that we know he has heartworms–cardiovascular activity can not only further damage the heart and lungs, now that they have to work harder to support the freeloading worms, but sections of the worms can break off and become lodged in blood vessels, causing a blood clot, which could kill him.

I tidied up his kennel today–it looks like we may need to use it more often now for awhile, in order to keep him from running around the house. I will also need to stock up on chew toys, so that he can get his energy out without elevating his heart rate too much.

So, here we are, embarking on a “new normal” for this little guy. The next step in “Hiro’s Journey” is to go back to the vet in a couple of days, where they will pull another blood sample to re-test him and have the results read by an outside lab to confirm the diagnosis for sure. (The vet advised me that they ran the first test twice in the office and both samples were positive, so the chance that this was a false-positive is astronomical.) They will also take a chest X-Ray, to look for signs of damage that has already occurred to the heart and lungs due to the infection, and help the veterinarian determine the best way to proceed.

The good news is that this infection was discovered about as early as it possibly could have been, which improves the chances that Hiro’s treatment will be successful and that he will be able to return to his active lifestyle someday.

Please keep up with your pets’ routine health screenings–I had no idea that my dog has been harboring dangerous parasites–he’s been eating, eliminating, and behaving in what I thought was a normal way for the past 6 months, and he never once blogged about his health concerns before, so I will start doing it for him now.

Thanks for reading, and Take Care!