Montana Update

This post is courtesy of my sister--

Montana went back to the vet Tuesday for her blood check up and to see a neurologist. Her blood count remained the same at 63%. Still higher than normal, but it has stabilized over the past 3 weeks. Good news.

In the past week or two, her stumbling, knuckling, falling on the stairs, inability to turn her 3 circles before laying down, inability to stand longer than a few minutes at a time, and difficulty pooping has continued to become more frequent/severe.

After watching the neuro vet do an exam, even I was able to pick out the deficits. It was interesting to see her check cranial nerves, reflexes, vestibular response, ROM/MMT, proprioception and gait. Sound familiar? Anyway, she had symptoms of both spinal cord injury and neuromuscular disease. On the spinal cord end, she had weakness in all 4 extremities and severe loss of proprioception (explaination of the falling). On the neuromuscular end she had the weakness and loss of her voice/bark/etc. She has lost almost 20lbs and I can tell you its pure muscle.

The next step was a myelogram which they did today. During a myelogram, they do a lumbar puncture, find the CSF, inject a dye and watch to see how it travels through the spine. Then under x-rays/CT and MRI they can look at how bending her neck, thorax, etc compressions or changes the alignment of her spine. They also did an EMG while she was sedated.

She was found to have 2 areas of compression in her neck, neither of which was severe enough to result in the symptoms we are seeing (no apparent spinal cord injury). The EMG was apparently very irregular and the neurologist is suspecting some type of myopathy. Following the myelogram, she kept Montana sedated to do a muscle biopsy. She is sending the results somewhere in California where we hope to figure out exactly what is going on. This will take approximately 7-10 days. The type of myopathy will determine whether it is treatable or not. Following the biopsies they brought her out of sedation and she had a seizure. This is not necessarily normal, but it is also not uncommon. They then gave her some Valium and are letting her rest easy. They denied my plea to come sleep with her this evening. They said she was really sensitive to noise at the moment and didn't want her to become too excited and move around too much if she saw me. Not to mention she was in the ICU and they keep strict visiting hours. I hope to bring her home in the morning/afternoon as long as the night goes ok.

Anyway, I am hoping for the best and that we get lucky and she has something that responds to some type of treatment. I will keep you all updated as I find out more information.