Reverse Sneezing... Or Worse? (Update!)

Update from:

http://rukimonster.blogspot.com/2007/09/reverse-sneezing-or-worse.html

So, I ended up taking her to the vet... And the vet said that Ruki has mild pneumonia. Her "reverse sneezing" is actually just coughing, and her licking up in her mouth was her licking up phlegm. Then her coughs would get so violent, they'd make her regurgitate. (Not "vomit"--vomiting comes from the stomach, regurgitating comes from other causes. Well-noted, Dr. Vet.) They confirmed this with x-rays.

So they gave us Clavamox--she just got off Clavamox for her pyoderma!--and the vet made some suggestions that have so far proved brilliant:

Raise Ruki's food and water bowls off the ground, about chin-height.

The thing is that bulldog's throats and airways are so short, that straining down and wolfing down food can mess with their breathing.

So I took an old Amazon.com shipping box, wrapped it in a plastic bag, and put her food and water up there. And amazingly she doesn't choke any more when she gobbles up her food! And she hasn't puked from coughing since! (But that could be just because she's getting better.)

I have to get her a new bowl since she eats with such gusto she knocks food and water all over the place--right now, I just hold the bowl while she eats. But this is great.

Now, the next step, is to look into changing her food and see if some day I can get her to actually *chew* her food!

Also, here's a link to a Yahoo! Answers post that gives some insight into too fast eating and the risk of bloat:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070329080847AAFNk1I

Reverse Sneezing... Or Worse?

Three nights ago, Ruki woke us up with a loud COUGH! We didn't think much of it, but then the next day she had a short fit of what I now think is reverse sneezing. That night, I took her for a walk, and she started the coughing, retching, reverse sneezing, which ended up with her vomiting repeatedly on the sidewalk. While we worked our way home, her hacking stopped, and she was OK.

Last night, around 2 a.m., we heard her hacking/coughing again, and then she started a puking session all over the apartment again. This morning and afternoon she's been hacking/coughing, but has been holding her puke down.

I've watched videos, and it looks like reverse sneezing. I'm just worried about the vomiting. Does anyone else's bulldog reverse sneeze and then vomit, too?

I don't want to have to go to the vet, and have them not know what it is and then charge us $100 for tests if it's something that's fairly common. She doesn't have a fever, isn't listless or lethargic, no runny nose, no extraordinary eye discharge, and the poo's fine.

Here's a video of her:

Sanitizing Properties of Eco-Friendly Household Cleaners?

So I recently started to buy eco-friendly cleaning fluids for the house. But then when you look at the ingredients, what's in there? There's usually a surfactant, a preservative, and maybe a natural fragrance.

There are (at least) two ways to think about cleaning: (1) I want to kill absolutely everything that's on my countertop, and even if I eat those nasties, then they'll be dead and of no danger to me and my loved ones, or (2) I just want to "wash" off any nasties and flush them away.

Products like Lysol and bleach do the former. This is often done through "lysis"--or a reverse osmosis where by sucking away the water outside of bacteria, the water inside the bacteria is drawn out, imploding the bacterial nasty. Or just through putting a lot of harsh, toxic stuff in the sprays that kill some other nasty way.

But the other way, while seeming not as "safe," might be just as good. Doctor's don't use crazy chemicals to wash their hands. They usually soap (though they'll sometimes use alcohol-based hand cleansers). I remember reading somewhere that just using water--no soap--is pretty effective, too. You don't have to kill the nasties, you just have to wipe them away.

Surfactants generally operate on oil allowing you to lift oil off of services. Oils are usually what traps the nasties and makes them stick to our counter-tops, etc. It does the same thing that soap does, without actually being soap.

Another option for sanitizing is to use products with bleach, vinegar, citrus, or hydrogen peroxide. Bleach degrades into salt and water. Hydrogen peroxide is an acid that kills bacteria, but also bubbles when reacting with organic substances, lifting dirt out of oil, the same way detergents work--or how peroxide cleans out cuts by bubbling up the dirt out of your cuts. Vinegar and citrus, similarly, are acids that can help to kill nasties.

Stinky Dog and Baking Soda Carpet Cleaner

There's no shying away from it--Ruki's a stinky dog. Her fur and her food gets in the rugs, and it just gets musty. I've tried candles, sprays, etc., but they don't seem to work for more than a few minutes.

The best thing so far has been to vacuum our floors, and use Arm & Hammer Pet Fresh Odor Eliminator. It's fragrance and baking soda. You sprinkle it on your rugs/carpets, let it sit there for 15 minutes (or more) and then vacuum it all up. It definitely smells good for a day or two (or three), but even after that the mustiness is nearly gone.

I believe the claims behind it are that the baking soda absorbs the biological nasties--proteins, enzymes, fluids--that cause odors. Then it also gets into the carpet fibers and breaks the static there--the static which makes it more difficult to vacuum out the pet hair. And of course the strong fragrance covers anything else up.

I also appreciate the fact that it's "more" natural than other things. I know Febreeze is supposed to be based on corn products, but I don't know what else is in there. The Pet Fresh is mostly baking soda. I can deal with that.

Micro-Chip Implants Linked to Animal Cancer

From AP News, via Yahoo!:

http://thnlnk.com/yahoo/Chip.implants.linked.to.animal.tumors/890

Published in veterinary and toxicology journals between 1996 and 2006, the studies found that lab mice and rats injected with microchips sometimes developed subcutaneous "sarcomas" — malignant tumors, most of them encasing the implants.

We got Ruki micro-chipped. This is disturbing because if every vet should have known TEN YEARS AGO that these microchips are causing cancer.

Understand, though, that the experiments were done on lab mice and not on dogs. Lab mice might be more prone to cancer than other animals, and some of the tests found the cancer incidental to other tests--so they don't know whether the mice were going to develop the cancerous growths anyways.

But this is definitely something to ask your vets about when considering micro-chipping in the future.

More from the article:

• A 1998 study in Ridgefield, Conn., of 177 mice reported cancer incidence to be slightly higher than 10 percent — a result the researchers described as "surprising."

• A 2006 study in France detected tumors in 4.1 percent of 1,260 microchipped mice. This was one of six studies in which the scientists did not set out to find microchip-induced cancer but noticed the growths incidentally. They were testing compounds on behalf of chemical and pharmaceutical companies; but they ruled out the compounds as the tumors' cause. Because researchers only noted the most obvious tumors, the French study said, "These incidences may therefore slightly underestimate the true occurrence" of cancer.

• In 1997, a study in Germany found cancers in 1 percent of 4,279 chipped mice. The tumors "are clearly due to the implanted microchips," the authors wrote.

Caveats accompanied the findings. "Blind leaps from the detection of tumors to the prediction of human health risk should be avoided," one study cautioned. Also, because none of the studies had a control group of animals that did not get chips, the normal rate of tumors cannot be determined and compared to the rate with chips implanted.

Still, after reviewing the research, specialists at some pre-eminent cancer institutions said the findings raised red flags.

Permethrin: Bio Spot and Zodiac Spot On

So I got fed up with paying $15 a pop for Frontline--and additionally am still worried about putting that toxic stuff on my puppy! So I looked into alternatives. The Petco carries Bio Spot, which has permethrin in it, and that's like $6 a pop. I then checked out the store where I buy Ruki's Innova, and they also only carried Zodiac, which also is made of permethrin.

Permethrin is an insect repellant. For humans, we used to use DEET. Now, you can buy permethrin as a clothing treatment. It's an insecticide, whereas DEET is a repellant. Permethrin kills insects on contact. But you don't want to get too much on your skin.

So I thought: Permethrin is safe enough for some kind of human use, and it's a *lot* cheaper than Frontline. I should give it a shot.

Until I did some research:

"Farnam's Bio Spot Flea & Tick Almost Killed Our Dog."

Apparently, a substantial number of dogs experience severe allergic or harmful reactions to permethrin, some of them experiences seizures from exposure.

Now, I know this isn't all dogs--and there are a lot of dogs out there. And my food vendor uses it and recommends the product. But is it really worth the risk? I decided no, and have been sticking with Frontline. I have decided, though, to use a lower dosage. Ruki's 37 lbs, but she's a bulldog, so has less surface area than your typical 22+ lb dog. So I use the "up to 22 lbs" dosage, which is half the dose of the 22+ lb product. And we won't use it at all during the winter.

I can see that we probably took the same chance when we first applied Frontline, but it appears to be the best of the pack. I wish there were a safer product, but it looks like there just isn't. If you want your pets free from fleas, ticks, and the problems and diseases associated with them, you need to use these chemicals, and it looks like Frontline's the safest (but most expensive) one out there.

Here's another article from the National Resource Defense Council, generally about flea/tick treatments, and the kinds that are being banned from the market:

Pet Products May Harm Both Pets and Humans

The simple truth, however, is that the poisons in many of these products are not safe, either for pets or humans. Government regulation of these products has been sketchy, and testing of their impact in the home has been inadequate. The result is that many of the products sold by the millions in grocery, drug and pet supply stores, even when applied as instructed on the box, can cause serious health consequences to pets and humans.

The main culprits are products that rely on a family of chemicals called organophosphates. One of these, tetrachlorvinphos, is still found in stores. Six others were removed from the market, one by one, from 2000 through 2006: chlorpyrifos, dichlorvos, phosmet, naled, diazinon and malathion. Many pet owners may still have leftover supplies of products containing these chemicals in their homes. They were used in brands marketed under a variety of names, including Alco, Americare, Beaphar, Double Duty, Ford's, Freedom Five, Happy Jack, Hartz, Hopkins, Kill-Ko, Protection, Rabon, Riverdale, Sergeant, Unicorn, Vet-Kem, Victory and Zema. Another family of chemicals, called carbamates, is also of potential concern. The two most common carbamate chemicals used in pet products are called carbaryl and propoxur.

Out of the Crate

Other interesting news: A week or two ago, soon after Ruki's 1-year birthday, we decided to give something new a try. We decided to let her sleep the night outside of the crate.

And you know what? No problems at all. I was, as I am prone to be, nervous and could barely sleep that night, listening for her every move. But she did nothing. She got up once and finished her bowl of water. (I call her Night Drinker because she barely drinks during the day, never in the morning, but at night she goes to town on the water.) The next morning, she roused when we started walking around, and it was good times for all.

So a day or two after that we graduated her to spending the day out of the crate. And you know what? She was fine. The day before, I was at home, so I kept an eye on her to see what she did during the day. And now I can tell you--insight into the life of a bulldog:

She sleeps.

And so nowadays, she sleeps all day, but on her bed, not in the crate. She also doesn't need to pee during lunchtime, which saves us on a dog-walker while I'm at school--though I'm at home 2-3 times during the work-week.

And she still *shivers* when we get home around 5 p.m.--she stands there in the middle of the living room staring at us, looks like she's not moving, then you realize she's shaking all over, like she's about to explode. That's her greeting to us. Shivery, ready to explode with excitement and joy. That's our Ruki.

Pyoderma

A few days ago, all of a sudden, we noticed that Ruki's fur looked... Bumpy. It looked like maybe she slept on it wrong. So when I reached down to smooth out her fur, I felt bumps. And I freaked. I dug around under the fur, but couldn't really see anything. I eventually found very small, pinkish bumps--all in all maybe 20 of them, each maybe 1/2 a centimeter in diameter, about an inch or so apart from each other.

I figured that maybe it's just an allergy, and so decided not to worry about it. But then we couldn't sleep because we *were* worried about it. We wondered: What might she be allergic to? We fed her some table scraps recently... Was it the soy in the soy sauce? I just Swiftered... Was it that? Were they fleas? We've been having centipede problems... Was she being bitten by centipedes?

After a day or so, I then noticed that some of the bumps were turning into scabs. I never saw her scratch them--they don't seem itchy--and she doesn't seem to mind when we root around, looking for them. So it doesn't look like she's bothered by these bumps under her fur, nor the scabs.

So we took her to the vet, Fresh Pond Animal Hospital. The vet said they weren't fleas or bug bites, and probably not allergies. Just "pyoderma"--a generic term for bacterial skin infections. Might be allergy-related, but who knows? He said it might be seasonal, too. And that we should watch out next fall and see if it re-occurs.

So then he charged us an arm and a leg for some antibiotic pills, some oatmeal-based shampoo, and some non-smelly fish oil to help with her "dry fur." Thieves praying on the ignorant, I tell you. But what can we do? We're at the mercy of their expertise.

Now, it appears that all's well. She's fine--she always has been. It's more that we were worried that she was dying. Hopefully it will all go away soon.