Okay, so Luke. Well, last Thursday I thought he was going to die. I went to give him one of his many doses of medicine that he was getting throughout the day, and he was just limp, breathing kind of hard, and his eye was crusted shut. I cleaned up his eye and wrapped him in a blanket and took him outside. The fresh air seemed to help him breathe easier. A few times I thought the breath he took was going to be his last, but he always took another. I took him to the vet Friday morning, told him I hadn't given him his meds since yesterday afternoon, and the vet said he thought it was probably Time. I told him I wanted to give Luke the chance to pass peacefully at home. My vet said that would be fine, and to call if he seemed to be in pain or if he was having difficulty breathing. Well I had to go out for a few hours Friday night and left Luke home with the family. I called to check on him and my husband said that he had cried out in pain a few times, and was pooping on himself. I asked him if he thought it was Time. I told him he needed to really think about it because my Vet was about to leave for the night. He said he thought it might be Time. I called my Vet and asked him to wait for us, and told my husband to load the kids and the dog into the car and meet me at the vets office. We converged there around 6:30, and when we got there Luke pooped on himself again. My Vet (who had a VERY big soft spot for Luke) took him in the back to clean him up. He didn't seem to really be in pain, and he wasn't having a hard time breathing. I felt like he wasn't ready to go. My vet could see that I didn't want to do it right then, and he said that he thought Luke would be okay until the morning, and if he wasn't I could call my Vet on his cell and he would meet me at the office to take care of things. He basically said not to worry about doing it during office hours and that he would come in and take care of it whenever I thought it was time. My vet is super awesome. In my head he is like a superhero...lol. So I brought him home and later that night he started panting. I thought, oh no, this is it. I took him outside to see if the fresh air would help him breathe easier and he was squirming to get away from me. I thought, great, he's trying to run away to die. He doesn't have the strength to stand so I put him on the ground and held him up and he tried to walk through the front yard. I picked him up and took him through the house to the back yard and set him down while helping him stand. He peed, and did the poop walk so he could poop more. Turns out he just didn't want to pee on me, which is ironic, because every time I take him somewhere (vet, groomer, ect) he pees on me to mark me! He had diarrhea the rest of the night, so I got pooped on a lot trying to get him outside before it came out. Finally he fell into a nice sleep. We woke up around 11 to go sell plasma (yeah, this is what we have resorted to pay our vet bills, and they are still almost $4000, ugh!) and I wrapped him up to take him in the van. He just slept, but he seemed really comfortable. The whole day Saturday he just spent sleeping. I was giving him sub-q fluids twice a day because I was noticing that he didn't have very much pee to squeeze out. All day Sunday he was also stable. He almost seemed like he was starting to feel better. He was off all of his meds, and all I was doing was giving him fluids, vit E oil on his nose because it was really dry, and artificial tears in his eye. Then yesterday I tried to offer him some cake. He really has a sweet tooth. He wouldn't take it from my hand, but he would lick it off of the sofa slip cover. So, I started smearing little bits of cake on the slip cover for him to lick off. I was mostly out of cake by the time he decided he was going to lick it off the slip cover, but he got a few good licks in. I tried to offer him other food, but he didn't want anything else. I offered him water, and he actually drank on his own. Later that night we got some Taco Bell (ugh, taco bell and cake in the same day...shame!)and he ate the steak from my taco! Later that night I got him some ground beef and he ate that like a monster. He ate this morning and is about to eat more now. He is still really weak, too weak to stand, but he is in good spirits. He is not on any meds. I have posted on numerous sites (prayersforpets.org and craigslist) and requested prayers for him. I do the infinite love and gratitude and try to direct it at him. I think that Luke is extra sensitive to people's feelings and I think he is very affected by the energy around him. I think that the chaotic energy around here was what started his immune system going crazy.
So anyway, so far so good. He is still off all of his meds and he seems to be improving instead of going the direction we all expected him to go. My vet said that he did have a client with autoimmune disease and the owner decided to stop all meds and the dog actually got better, so there is realistic hope for him. He is REALLY enthusiastic about eating! I wrote that a few days after all of that was going on, still not sure whether or not he would live or die. He continued to improve, eating and drinking on his own. He got stronger and stronger each day. My vet said that he had no explanation. Luke was on super high doses of steroids and just coming off of those cold turkey should have sent him into an adrenal crisis, but that didn't happen. He just got better.
Oh, another funny thing about it all...you know how kids don't really understand death. They think they can 'die' and then just come back to life. So we were explaining to Jonathan, who is 4, how Luke is really sick, and Dr. K is going to help him die so he can stop being so sick. We told ourselves, well, at least he'll be able to understand how final death is. He'll understand that you don't just 'come back to life.' Well, I guess we were the ones that got the lesson, because apparently, sometimes you do just come back to life.
