Heartache

Luna has had trouble with shallow breathing, flared nostrils, cold paws, white gums and wobbly legs for a couple of days and I was going to take her to the vet this afternoon after my dance class, only she collapsed this morning on the walkies up the hill to the park...one minute she was trotting along slowly, the next minute her legs were at an odd angle under her and she was down on the tarmac in a puddle of pee, which was fortunately streaming off down the hill. 
I sat down with her, straightened out her limbs and clipped Nobu and Claire's leashes to my belt, and after resting a bit I managed to pick her up like a forklift and prop her on my chest to carry her home with Nobu and Claire in tow. So it was straight off to the vet's...where I was able to watch my Halloween Kimono national TV debut on Fuji's Nonstop programme in the waiting room, with a heavy heart for sure.

 To give the bad news in a nutshell, Chiaro di Luna is getting worse, not better, and is borderline euthanasia...I'm not ready to let her go that way yet, there's too much life and enjoyment in her eyes and body, she still wants to be with us, if only a short while longer...
Although she has put on a little weight, after a battery of tests, it is clear that she has

• incipient pulmonary edema (not quite enough to warrant invasive treatment) 
• cardiac arrhythmia - occurring every four beats or so
• large splenic mass- affecting the entire spleen
• huge numbers of bubbly mass in the soft tissue of the abdomen
• suffering from anemia with low HCT (33.6%), hemoglobin levels (11.2g/dl) and red blood cell count (5060,000/dl)
• white blood cell count off the charts ( 52800/ul)
• elevated platelet count (PLT)

Just having her keel over like that is such a shock, although she's quite happy to laze and doze away the day with me nearby, and still loves her food: clearly she is having trouble breathing in between gulps, but she does love her tidbits and is fully involved in life with the family yet. 

The vet gave me some strong pain-killing rectal suppositories for when the pain gets too intense, she'll be gasping for breath and you'll know, he said. The side-effects are bloody diarrhoea, so I'm not looking forward to either her pain or the side-effects...never easy, this business of dying...