Cory’s MRI
Yesterday morning we took Cory to the clinic in Kirkland, about an hour’s drive from our home in Seattle, for his MRI. We were told that he was next in line after a poodle, who was undergoing an MRI at the time we brought Cory in, and they estimated he would be done between noon and 1 p.m. We went to work and called in throughout the day, only to be told that they had not taken Cory in until around 3 p.m. Jay and I went there to get him after work last night and they said he would not be ready until around 8 p.m., so Jay and I found a nearby restaurant and had dinner.
We got a call on our cell phone (while having dinner) about 8 p.m. and the doctor said he wanted to keep Cory overnight in order to be sure he was fully recovered from the anesthesia. We went to pick him up this morning and it took forever to get him discharged due to administrative issues.
The findings of the MRI show that Cory’s right shoulder pain is not due to a rotator cuff tear, as was expected, but rather to osteo-arthritis. He may be helped with an injection into the shoulder (we have to ask the bone doc about that). The cause for all of the rest of Cory’s symptoms is a herniated disk toward the base of his tail, which is impinging on the nerve cord. The doc believes that it is fixable and gives us chances for complete success in the 90 percentile range.
We were on the moon with happiness until we got Cory home, and found how much he has gone downhill in the past 24 hours. His entire hind end is partly paralyzed now and extremely weak and uncoordinated. I called the vet tech and she said she was surprised to hear that as she had walked Cory this morning and did not witness this. The vet put these words right into the written report….”This is not a life ending condition.”
Based upon their assurances that Cory does not need to be crated if he is kept in a small confined area where he cannot climb onto furniture (or navigate stairs), we put him into our bedroom with a big bowl of ice cold water and opened the sliding glass door onto the deck so that he can get fresh air. Luckily it is a beautiful sunny day. Cory will be kept in this room pretty much all the time unless one of us is right with him, and I suppose he’ll have to have his life jacket on when he is out of the bedroom so we can help him stay upright to take him outside.
We now need to consult with the bone doc to see if he thinks the injection into the right shoulder will be of much benefit, and how long the benefit will last. Depending on that answer, we will then schedule Cory’s surgery to get the disk fixed ASAP, (we’ll need to coordinate to have it all done at once if we decide to do the shoulder at all). So we are waiting from a call from the shoulder doc to get answers before we can move forward with scheduling the surgery.
It creates quite the emotional paradox to be given such hopeful information while seeing our boy go downhill so quickly.
