Baloo.. Blood, one of the Bear Necessities

Baloo woke up and was feeling rough. He felt weak and standing up was far too much effort. His eye and cheek hurt and when he caught sight of it he looked like he'd gone 4 rounds with Mike Tyson, but he didn't remember it at all. Mum offered him some breakfast but despite his inner Labrador self, he just couldn't face it.

A trip to see the vets was called for.

Sarah had a look at him and was worried. His gums were white and he was coughing. When she listened to his chest it sounded loud and crackly. He had a swollen cheek and he had a haematoma in the conjunctiva so it was difficult to see his eye but no one knew why this had happened.

The main thing we were worried about was where had his blood gone all of a sudden?!

To start with he had some blood tests to try and figure out what had happened. There wasn't much wrong with the bloods other than a low PCV (packed cell volume) which meant he was definitely severely anaemic.

There are a few things that can cause a dog to become anaemic but only a few that cause their blood to stop clotting and we suspected that Baloo had a clotting disorder given the excessive injury on his face with no history of trauma.

A clotting disorder is something that can occur for various reasons that prevents an animal's blood from clotting as normal. This means they can bleed a lot from what would normally be fairly minor injury and eventually they can bleed to death. 

Lung worm infection can cause clotting disorders as well as a cough so this was one of the first things we ruled out. We ran a test for this which came back negative.

Next, we xrayed Baloo to find out why his chest sounded so terrible. On the xray we could see that his trachea (wind pipe) looked very narrow which can be a sign of rodenticide poisoning (rat bait poisoning).

Baloo hadn't knowingly eaten anything unusual but we were concerned that maybe he had been helping himself to things he shouldn't have been (he is a Labrador after all!).

Even though Baloo's owners didn't think he could have had access to any, sometimes when dogs go roaming across fields and getting into mischief they may accidentally find rat bait that other people have left out. Unfortunately, I think Baloo had been one of the unlucky dogs that had done this and it was likely he had been getting access to it for a while.

Vitamin K is the treatment for rodenticide poisoning so we dosed Baloo up with lots of it but it takes some time to work. It was getting touch and go whether he would have any blood left by the time the medicine started to work so we decided we needed to step in and help him out.

Peaches, our Vet Nurse Heather's dog stepped up to the rescue as she was a suitable blood type for Baloo. She came in and we took 350ml of her blood and then slowly transfused it into Baloo.

Although he had the transfusion very slowly over about 4 hours, his temperature started to rise and he still looked very poorly. We were all very worried about him.

A few hours later, once the transfusion had stopped Baloo started to feel like himself again. He snoozed overnight and by the morning felt like a new dog, tail wagging and appetite back.

He went home that evening, still on the vitamin K tablets and had to be very careful not to bump himself for a few days so lots of rest and relaxation was on the cards.

After a rodenticide poisoning the Vitamin K tablets have to be continued for a long time, about 2-4 weeks depending on the type of rat poison they have eaten. As we don't know which poison Baloo had we sent off some blood to the lab so that they could tell us how long to continue with treatment for.

When Baloo came back in for his recheck a few days later, he was bouncing off the walls and looked unrecognisable to the collapsed, poorly dog that first came in to see us. It was great to see him back to his usual happy self.

Because he was such a fighter Baloo has been crowned October's patient of the Month!