Edna has not been well the whole time we've had her (4 months now). She has terrible lungs, trouble breathing, an occasional cough, huge bilateral hernias on her stomach, an enlarged heart and a heart murmur. We have had various trips to the vets but with no real outcome.
We wanted to get to the bottom of her problems so we took her to a new vets and they talked us through the possible routes we could go down. We wanted to get her 'udders' fixed and get her spayed at the same time as we didn't want to run the risk of her getting pyometra but there is a huge risk of her having an anesthetic because of her poor heart and lungs. The vet said it was a catch 22 situation.
We could leave her with her hernias and not spay her and just try and settle her lungs with medication hoping nothing would deteriorate, but by doing this we ran the risk of one of her hernias strangelating (the intestine would twist and would evetually die, in 24 hours she would be dead)
Or we could risk having the surgery and get her hernias fixed, spay her and try to increase her quality of life, although the anaesthetic itself could be life threatening.
It was difficult to decide what was for the best, all we wanted was for Edna to have a better quality of life and so we decided to go ahead with the surgery. We trusted the vet and they had explained everything with us.
She had the surgery yesterday and we brought her home last night. It was horrible waiting for the phone call as we were unsure what the outcome would be. The vet was fantastic and called us just before he began the surgery and even during to say everything was going well!
They found out that her windpipe is slowly deteriorating, this is why she struggles to breath sometimes, this has happened through age. She has an enlarged heart and had sever bronchitis. They fixed her hernias, the tear in her stomach was so bad that she had her intestine and some of her spleen in there. They also found that she had some small mammary lumps that they have sent off for testing. They also spayed her at the same time.
She was very weak when we brought her home last night and she slept all night, today she has been up and had a little walk around the garden. You would never guess that yesterday she had life threatening surgery! These photos are from when we brought her home last night...
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