Hard weekend ... :(

Hi Everyone Louis’s Mum here….

It’s been a hard weekend again, and it didn’t help that I felt quite poorly as well.

So an update on Louis, we collected him from Liverpool Teaching Hospital on Friday night, he had just had another blood transfusion just before we collected him and his PCV went up to 23%. He came bounding out and looked full of beans, and was really happy to see us. Isabella discharged him but before handing over 3 bags full of medication she went through his results and next steps. They said that they are waiting for a couple of test results to come back and one was for Babesiosis Disease, which is a tick related illness.

She advised that the biopsy’s from his liver, spleen and bone marrow haven’t shown anything unusual, his spleen is a little enlarged which it probably due to the medication he’s on. She went on to tell us that because Louis hasn’t been responding to treatment since he became ill on Christmas Day and hasn’t become stable they don’t think it there is much more they could do for him. They asked us to consider putting him to sleep if he becomes critical again. We really didn’t want to hear that, but they are the professional’s and I guess they needed to give us their professional opinion.

We drove home and Louis looked really happy to see Olga although I’m sure he wouldn’t admit it lol. He enjoyed his tea and of course he had a Mcflurry.

On Saturday he potted round the back garden and was looking quite happy, we have had to make him wear a cone because he keeps trying to nibble his sore paws, which Olga is scared to death of and I’m sure he was chasing her because he knew she was frightened of it, he’s a bugger at times. He also decided to try and chase a cat whilst he was out bless him. Then Saturday night he seemed to be a little quieter but we thought he was just tired then we noticed his paw had swelled up again, so of course we started to think he was eating through his red blood cells quickly, so we had a rough night Saturday and Sunday watching him like a hawk.

He just slept most of Sunday and didn’t really eat much, which is never a good sign, we both decided we needed to have a plan for Monday, and it didn’t help that I felt terrible as well. So our plan was to contact Stefano at Rutland in the morning and see if he would see Louis, we already had an appointment but because we were technically still being seen by Liverpool it could be an issue. John called Rutland Monday morning and asked if we could see Stefano any earlier, and they gave him an appointment for 13:30. John took him over and said he would call me as soon as he knew what the PCV was, John thought he was at around 15% and I thought maybe 18%, either way we would ask for another cross matched blood transfusion.

You probably wonder why we took him back to Rutland, well one of the main reasons is Louis has a great rapour with Stefano and he seems to treat his patients like they are his own dogs, and the other is when Louis was at Liverpool in ICU we were under the impression he was being watched carefully, but what we found when we were bathing him is that he has been allowed to chew the very end of his tail until there is actually bone showing, that would have taken some time to do and I’m sure there would have been evidence that he’d done it.

I had to wait at home whilst John took him over, it felt like a lifetime until he called and told me Louis’s PCV was 21%! I know it’s still down 2% but I was amazed and started crying, daft I know but we honestly thought we were going to have to make a really difficult decision, because last week he was eating through a transfusion in 48 hours.

Louis's Tail!

Louis's GoFoundMe Page

He does this to us all the time, we come to a decision and then he surprises us. We know he is not stable and he’s still very very poorly, and I know I’ve not to get excited, because next week his PCV could be down and we may never get to the place where he is stable, but at the moment we have breathing space.

He is sleeping a lot, and we do expect too much from him, but I’m just happy that we still have him here, and we can still give him cuddles.

Love Louis’s Mum xx