Horace Goes to the Vet’s

Horace went to the vet today to be neutered, and we learned that he is a poorly boy.

I asked the vet to check his teeth as there is something so odd about his eating – as I have mentioned before. Last weekend I tried moving him to meat, but he just spat out the meat and hunted out the few biscuits I put in there. He seemed genuinely confused by the new food in his bowl. So I persevered for a couple of days thinking he would get used to it. But he didn’t. He is so small, after a couple of days it was apparent he was going to lose a lot of weight and we put him back to the dried food again.

So I really wanted the vet to check his teeth and to take out any teeth if there was a problem while they were neutering him.

The x-rayed him and his jaw and teeth were OK, so they then scanned him and found he has a “very tiny brain”. He has fluid on the brain and would have been born like this. The vet we saw, said that when they looked at the scan, all the vets there were surprised that Horace was alive and functioning because his brain is so tiny.

The vet said the condition could be dangerous if the fluid grows – and we don’t know if the fluid has grown proportionately since he was a puppy or if it is the same. Although I don’t think he acts any differently and I certainly don’t think we’ve seen a degeneration in him. They will put him on some medication to try to reduce the fluid and we’ll talk to the vets again on Monday.

The condition is hydrocephalus and this explains so much of Horace’s oddities – the skipping round and losing his food, being comfortable in the little areas he knows, being random with his hearing, absolutely no sense of direction… 
I had got to the stage where I was pretty convinced there was something behind his oddities and I had so hoped it was going to be his teeth and they would remove a couple and he’d be fine. I’d actually said to Ian just this weekend that if we’d had the money I would have taken him to see a specialist to see if there was something underlying which we weren’t aware of because his behaviour is SO different to the others, so I suppose it is more of a disappointment that it’s something serious than a surprise that he has something wrong with him.
But the good thing is we now know that he really is very special and with his tiny brain he is never going to be the same as the others. I think we’ll better know how to treat him. He is a happy pup, and rarely unhappy, so that’s what we must try to maintain.

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