Well, Stella our bulldog had been doing well until recently. We think she just had an overactive week of playing and wrestling with her brother Rufus, and she woke us up Saturday morning breathing heavy and not feeling well. The way we can tell she's not feeling well is that she won't lay or sit down, she uses her stomach muscles to breath, her eyes are half closed, and she pretty much just looks like she feels miserable.
We promptly steam treated her in the bathroom and gave her some lemon juice - which worked a bit and helped her spit up some phlegm that was in her trachea. However, we didn't see her improve much over the course of an hour - so we took her down to our local vet.
Once we got her to
Docside Vets (a great vet here in Baltimore) - they gave her some oxygen and actually put some ice packs in towels on her to cool her down. Another interesting thing they did was to pour some rubbing alchohol on her feet, apparently this helps them cool down!
After about 45 minutes of this - she seemed to be feeling much better, and her temp. had dropped from 102 to about 101.6, enough for the vet to feel good about sending her home. Now I wonder about the benefits of the steam treatments since that causes her to get hot, and have even more trouble breathing. We are hoping to have a home nebulizer set up in the near future for these episodes - stay tuned. I will post all the info once we get it from our vets.
