When we took him in yesterday they gave him some fluids because he seemed a little dehydrated (we also discussed the fact that when my mom left there to take him home I'd be going five mile up the street to where the things were made, though this time the lot number shows HIS bag came from one of our other plants. ) The vet strongly suspects something called Cushings Syndrome in addition to the (confirmed) collapsing trachea. There's really not a lot to do about the latter; our main vet agreed with the ER vet that while stents are good for collapses higher up, they have a poor success rate with those deep inside the chest. And as my mother noted after the first X-ray, his trachea narrows to about half its size fairly early, then narrows about as much more once it nears his lungs. It looks like, as with the (possible) Cushings Syndrome, it's something we can manage but not really cure, though I do wonder what effect, if any, placing a stent in the upper trachea would have on the lower part.

It's not necessarily as dire as we feared, but still pretty serious. X-rays also showed a very enlarged liver, and the vet thinks that's compressing the diaphragm and lungs, thus contributing to breathing problems, so he spent most of today doing a test for Cushings. We'll have the results Friday, and if that confirms his suspicions the prognosis seems significantly better. The vet did reiterate he's never seen a dog die from a collapsed trachea, only one in vet school that needed the stent in his upper trachea. At this point I honestly don't know; meanwhile Fella has good days and bad days, but even the bad ones are better than the good ones were before he went on meds. There's no really good end game there, so we're just trying to make his remaining life as good as we can as long as we can. Which is what you should do with any pet, after all, and even we don't KNOW when we'll lose him. There's no reason his liver couldn't stop growing benign tumors and him live another ten years; that's just not the way I'd bet. Miracles have been known to happen though; just in the last year I've added another example to my collection of "I'd be dead now if God hadn't done this, this and this. "