Mondays used to be the regular day I visited the vet with various cases for a vet to examine & recommend treatment.

Often on those trips, I would take a dog (or 9 & 10) that I just met that morning for the first time, only aware of the background handed over by the folks at the shelter and a record car under my arm to support any medical report we had recorded.

Today things were very different. Two of the three dogs visiting the vet had come to the shelter in the previous week, been attended to and monitored by me and on the vet run because I was aware they needed further examination. The third doggy was seeing the vet today was coming from a foster home, where one of Care for Dogs volunteers, Gill, has a close eye on some difficult or special cases along with her many Cat’s & kittens she manages to help.

BB was first to be seen by the vet who remarked on the vast improvement in the wound they had seen a week ago on the neck. So too the wounded foot.

We have no idea as to how the wounds occurred but we do know they must have been very painful & driven BB crazy until we were able to give him some relief.

The guys at the shelter really do a wonderful job every day of actually catching the dog, not an easy task I can assure you as it took us 30 minutes today, then holding him still whilst meticulously cleaning wounds, applying lotions & potions and then where applicable redressing with bandages.

The wounds today looked pink, clean & dry proving BB is really on the mend.

BB came to us a week ago with a massive open wound to his neck, along with maggots and a foot rotting away too. Khun Nod had to blow dart BB to catch him in Doi Saket evading all previous attempts to capture him & help him.

But the reason BB was seeing the vet today was for a blood test as we noticed at the shelter he had blood dripping from his nose.

Under the microscope the vet was able to see a round cell and that proves he has TvT (Transmissble Venereal Tumor), a tumor up his nose, after sniffing the TvT infected blood of a female. We already have him on treatment for suspected E-Canis so when that’s finished, we shall start the Chemo on his nose. By that time his coat will have grown back on his neck and he will be ready to run around Doi Saket again !

Next up to see the vet was Tiger.

This poor guy believe it or not came to the shelter a week ago with a large hole just under his ear and he was holding his head at an angle.

We cleaned him up and started him on meds straight away and saw the fluids we flushed the wound with, come up & out of his ear. This was an infected inner ear that had burst out through the side of his head.

He must have been in agony, let alone feeling really dizzy and disorientated.

Today his ear does not have 2 opening to the outside world, as the wound has already closed and when the vet peered into his ear with the scope, she saw fungus and suggested the infection could have originated from a large build up of fungus within the ear and after an aggressive scratch with a hind leg on a regular basis, the outer surface had opened up and become the awful wound we saw last week.

The last doggy to see the vet today was Tdua Noi who we have been treating for quite sometime with limited success.

Her skin was scraped today and she is still testing positive for Dermodec Mange and her blood test is also showing her to have the condition we have been treating Heptazanoosis, a blood parasite.

The vet said that due to Tdua Noi having these for such a prolonged period, the treatment would need to be equally a long drawn out process.

Whilst I had the vets attention (not always easy) I started a conversation about Tdua Noi’s skin & in particular the profusion of blackheads, the relaxed folds of skin & the presence of hair along the back and forearms. I asked the vet about their experience with Cushings Syndrome. Sorry to be boring about this subject but to me it is something the vets here seem to be avoiding or are oblivious of.

Never one to pass up an opportunity, I rattled off the details of the other 3 cases we believe we have at the shelter (Khaow, Little James & Petal) and the vet disappeared off to consult with a few others and some literature.

The vet explained that to test for Cushings, we would need to spend 2,000 baht on a full days testing, whereby the vet would test hormone production by the Pituitary and Adrenal glands. The result the vet said would tell us if there were problems with either of these and it was possible that tumors were developing on the glands.

When I asked about medicines, I received confirmation to another vets advice yesterday, saying that Mitotane was not available in this country.

As is my want, I got busy googling and find another product Vetoryl that is widely used to treat this condition too. In fact, if you type the word into your friendly search engine, it is quite surprising the activity out there (over 79,000 items) surrounding this condition.

The vet advised that here in Thailand, treatment of this Endocrine System problem would typically be to remove the gland but that brings very high risk with complications. It would also be very expensive. Apparently 85% of test results show problems with Pituitary and 5 – 10% being Adrenal gland issues. So big issues surrounding the brain !! And the gland in a human is the size of a vegetable Pea.

So we need to think about how we deal with the 4 cases we have. Maybe we have our hands tied. The vets are not oblivious to the condition, they have no helpful answers to their clients questions. That must be extremely demorialising for them.