Pepper Is Doing Great
I was holding off before giving another update on Pepper until a few things were more certain. After that, life got in the way a little bit.
These days Pepper is doing just great. I walk her fairly often and her leg may not be 100% better, but it’s close. In fact, her leg got so much better that surgery wasn’t even necessary. It was a pretty amazing recovery. Pepper is even back to playing ball. (Though, I do take it a little bit easier on her now.) With all the nice weather this summer, I was tempted to take her out in the backyard and throw the frisbee for her, but I think that might be a bit much.
Pepper looking at me, wanting something.
It turned out that Pepper did not have Cushing’s Disease.
I don’t remember the sequence of events exactly, but I know that an x-ray was done of her abdomen and it showed something on her liver. I was then sent to a vet that was better equipped to find out what was going on. They shaved Pepper’s belly and did an ultrasound of her liver and they also did a biopsy. The biopsy came back normal and the ultrasound showed that a good part of Pepper’s liver was enlarged. I think the next step was to do exploratory surgery. Or we could do nothing and just keep an eye on Pepper to see how she does.
I should mention that one of her symptoms is that she had started drinking more than twice the amount of water per day as she used to and had started to have accidents in the house because she just couldn’t hold it. An UTI was ruled out when the symptom first appeared over a year earlier and again around the time that Cushing’s Disease was brought up. The new vet had another theory, though. She put Pepper on Desmopressin, which comes as eye drops. I think it’s some sort of hormone. Immediately after trying the eye drops, Pepper was back to drinking her normal amount of water and no more accidents in the house.
So I just continue to watch for anything else out of the ordinary, other wise Pepper is in pretty good health. Ok, she does have what looks like a big goose egg above her right front leg. The vet said it’s most likely just a fatty tumor and nothing needs to be done about it if it isn’t bothering her.
It’s so good to have Pepper back to walking around, playing, and just being her happy self.
