Blitzen's stay with us is now starting on year #2. He joined us at the very end of December 2020, and officially joined our family in January 2021.

Blitzen's first year was all about getting him settled in, learning the rules of our household, continuing to reduce the resource guarding, and figuring out his back pain issues.

The back pain issue is the one that is taking a long time to figure out. If you recall in the last update, we met with Dr. Christensen at Behavior Vets in Castle Pines. She helped set up a medication trial for us to start testing.

Partially because of his back pain issues, he is difficult to handle and normally needs to be sedated at the vet office for any hands-on exams, blood work, etc. Our attempts with our general practitioner vet were not being successful, so we started working with Dr C.

The meds we have trialed so far have not given us the results we need. It takes a lot of patience to work through trials when your dog does not seem to be affected positively with the medications that tend to work well for many dogs.

To test, I need a day when I can be around and observing and checking to see if they are having the desired affect. For those of us who work full time, it can be hard to find days to do that testing!

If you have ever done any medication trials, you know that we start with a low dose of the test med. If we don't see the results we need, but also do not see any negative side effects, we continue testing gradually higher and higher doses until we reach the maximum safe dose for that particular dog.

If that medication at the highest safe dose does not work, then we try a different medication or combination of medications.

We have tried several different things so far, none of which have worked for us. When we were testing gabapentin and trazadone, we discovered that the trazadone was actually further agitating him rather than calming him down.

When we were testing gabapentin by itself, we were accidentally given the wrong dose of the medication in a refill from the vet. The tablets were supposed to be 100 mg, and that's what the bottle said. At the time, we had worked up to testing the highest dose considered safe for his size.

However, the pills were actually 300 mg not 100 mg. So he ended up getting THREE TIMES what was considered the highest safe dose for him. The pills do not state how many mg they are, but I quickly figured out right AFTER I gave him the pills that they were not in fact 100 mg pills.

We made a frantic call to our vet. She in turn made a call to the ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center.  Our advice was to keep a close eye on him but did not need to head to the ER unless we saw any concerning effects. Fortunately, three times the highest dose he was supposed to get did not seem to affect him at all. Apparently, if he was going to overdose on anything gabapentin was the best choice.

Another med we tried caused him to vomit. And then, he decided he needed to guard his vomit from us. (Refer back to his resource guarding issues discussed in previous Bulletins.) So that was fun for no one.

We also tried another medication to give prior to that med to prevent nausea, and then re-tested that medication. Still no success.

We are once again testing a new medication at this writing (at the end of March 2022) to see if it will help us.

Other than medication testing, we have continued to work on the usual stuff. Daily walks. Daily training.

We are just getting him back into group classes after a winter break.

He continues to play a ton with the dogs who board with us. We do have to keep an eye when he plays too rough and too much, as it definitely affects his back pain and therefore his ability keep his cool.

Back in January, we went back to his pain meds for a week to get him feeling better. If there was any doubt that pain was a major factor in the times he is crabby with others, that week solidified it for us. The week he was on the pain meds was easily the happiest he has been in the past year. He was clearly feeling so much better. And when he feels better, he is far more tolerant of everything else.

Which is why we keep testing meds so that we can get him in for an MRI and get really thoroughly checked out. Pain meds help in the short term, but we need to figure out why he continues to have recurring back pain at his age.

Once we can get that figured out and on the right track, he will be on the road to a much happier, more pain-free life so we can all enjoy life!

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