Stubborn Idealism

Binky

Date: Sun 26 July 2009
Time: 8:18 PM EDT

I had Binky euthanized today. We'd been fighting a stubborn case of chylothorax for six months. The veterinarians couldn't diagnose a root cause despite lots of testing. We'd been managing the disease with rutin pills given three times daily, prescription low-fat food, and almost weekly trips to the vet to have the accumulated liquid taken out of his chest.

He had surgery once in February and again in March at the NCSU Veterinary Teaching Hospital. The first surgery was for thoracic duct ligation, partial pericardiectomy, and cisterna chyli ablation. That's the standard procedure for this condition, with a success rate of about 70%. It didn't work for Binky. The second surgery was to advance part of his omentum up into his chest to help reabsorb the leaking liquid. I have no idea what the success rate of that is. It seemed to help Binky, since from then on whenever they tapped his chest they got very little liquid from the side that had the omentum in it. It wasn't a cure though.

So I kept taking him in to get his chest tapped once a week or so. I would have been glad to have done that until he died of old age. But chyle is abrasive to the inner surface of the chest wall, and it causes scar tissue to grow. Besides permanently reducing lung capacity by taking up room in the chest and causing it to constrict, the scar tissue makes the liquid separate into small pockets, which makes getting significant amounts of it out impossible. Binky reached that point yesterday.

Comments: 0
TrackBacks: 0