Last month, besides my husband having sinus surgery and I required an urgent eye surgery, our male Lab was having trouble walking, his left eye had also become droopy. His gait was not stifled as if he had had a stroke, it was more like stiff-legged. Oh, Buddy is 9 years old and has been on 30 units of insulin 2x/day for four years.
My Vet told me that Buddy's eye was a result of a mini-stroke, aka, palsy. He told me that his walking problems were due to the diabetes causing the kidneys to disallow the body to utilize protein - Buddy's muscles were withering away. I was also told that Buddy probably would not make it through this coming winter. I cried for two days afterward.
While I was still at the Vet, I asked if he could give us a prescription for Doxycycline just in case part of Buddy's problem was due to re-occurring tick-borne diseases. The Vet had no problem with prescribing the medication.
Within a few days, Buddy's ability to walk improved tremendously! He even tried running again like in his puppy days. I surely thought that his death sentence might be postponed.
Recently, Buddy has been licking one of his back paws. I had not noticed how bad the situation became because my vision is compromised after my eye surgery. I needed to use a large magnifying glass to really see the problem.
Egads! Buddy's paw looked as though he had chewed the tip of his "toe" off! I immediately cleaned it, applied Bacitracin and triple antibiotic ointment and bandaged it. I also made an appointment with our Vet and will be seeing him in two hours.
My biggest fear is gangrene setting in over time, or simply the increased problems which diabetics have regarding healing. My stomach is literally in knots this morning.
I wanted to post this in a Diabetes sub-topic section for dogs, but the "search" function is not working and has not been working for the past day or so.
Thanks for listening.
