Quote:
Originally Posted by Oxford
I second the emotion on MU Vet. We were raising our 8th Guide Dog puppy and she presented an auto immune disease called "strangles". When we took her there, they thought she was a goner, but diagnosed it in two days. 7 weeks of prednizone, a year total with us, 4 months at Leader Dogs for the Blind and voila......... shes a working guide with a blinded man in SD. Prednizone stunted her growth but at 52# shes the little engine that does.
|
I got a little short with MU cardiology a couple weeks ago. During his regular cardiology appointment and chest x-ray he had a mass show up in his chest and they wanted him to go to oncology for general anesthesia and a CT scan; possible surgery to remove it or chemo. No signs of spreading; likely a slow growing carcinoma but they weren't sure and wanted the in depth look.
I just wanted to ask them what the **** they were thinking. I get it; teaching hospital and they're going to overtreat 100 times out of 100 if you let them. But FFS, he'd have a 0% chance of surviving the surgery, a 10% chance of surviving the chemo (that shits terrible on the heart), a 100% chance of being miserable if I administered it and for what gain? Hell, he would've only been 50/50 to even make it back from the general and the CT.
So he has a mass in his chest and a heart the size of a grapefruit - the heart was going to fail well before the mass got him. There was just nothing left to do and they were trying to schedule appointments with oncology.
I felt bad about being irritable later because they're the ones that found the heart failure to begin with; they're why he had a nice year down the stretch. But at some point the answer can't just be 'treat treat treat' and when I'm trying to get some straight answers regarding the status of his heart...maybe give me that rather than have me sending him to the cancer ward. His heart finally gave out a whopping 2 weeks later and the amount of pissed I'd have been had he spent any of that time going through chemo would be pretty much off the scale. Cardiology needed to do better there because someone a little less studious about that stuff would've gotten led around and done their pet a disservice.
All that said, they're the best in the region. Just a remarkable group, provided you're willing to wait a couple hours for pretty much anything you go in there to do. They're not sudden, but they're damn good.