Canine Heart Murmur (part 2).

Parts 1 and two of this entry were started on October 7th, 2009.

I'm going to take this moment to digress a bit. To this day, I think back and figure I can pinpoint the time when Jack began to notice, or at least feel the effects of his heart murmur. Since he was young, every fourth of July, Jack would come into whatever room I was in and basically hide for protection. For whatever reason he thought I was going to protect him from the booming sky. Between my mom and me, I was the safety zone whenever something really scared him. He didn't scare that often though. However, not long after he was diagnosed with it, Jack began to come into my room uncharacteristically, and crawl into my bed space where he would hide for some time. My guess is that whatever discomfort he was feeling by the changes in his body, brought him to me, looking for help, or protection.

Well they either screwed up, or his condition rapidly, and I mean rapidly worsened. Within a week that cough became regular, very pronounced, and even attained the telltale sound that indicated fluid was now an issue. By this point his daily energy had already been slowly declining, but a supplement (called The Missing Link by Designing Health, Inc.) had temporarily reversed that pattern; when the fluid hit his lungs, he would get the zombie nod (where his head would bob, eyes half closed), his energy level shot into the floor.

Additionally, since his murmur's onset, his rib cage has gotten wider and he quickly lost muscle mass, causing his bones to protrude more. You see, when the heart loses efficiency, it has to work harder to meet its quota of keeping the body alive; as a result of the constant overworking the heart does to compensate, it swells to an abnormal size and from this a whole bunch of problems arise. I'm not a doctor, but I assume as your heart falls behind in its task of providing oxygenated blood to the entire body, an expected long-term result could be general muscular atrophy. He grew skinnier with his ribs protruding more.

Well, one night our fears were realized when Jack couldn't go to sleep due to a cough that forced itself onto him every time he tried to lie down. That night we stood vigil propping him up on both left and right sides of his body because it seemed his cough was at its worst when he was on either side. He got rest that night and actually woke with renewed energy, but we knew it was no way to live for any of us. So we took him in to the vet the next morning to see if we could fix him. Jack came home with a prescription for Lasix and Enalapril.