16 year old dog- kidney problems / arthritis, recent medicine change - bad.

Hi this is a longer post I know- but my dog is not doing good at all, so I want to ensure I post through notes, any help / suggestions are deeply
appreciated.

I have a miniature pincher, shes going to be 16 in January, and she’s 17 pounds. She has recently had a decline in health, started off over a month ago when she started urinating very frequent, the vet thought it was a urinary infection, but it was not. So they started her on some medicine to help her control her bladder called PROIN, dose- one 25 mg pill per day (half pill at at both morning and night).

Around that time, Right we noticed her balance was off too. She had trouble on the hardwood floors especially.

Not much longer, my sister had her on the couch watching tv, and all the sudden she possably had a seizure. My sister said the dog yelped, it was a sound like she never heard before- then the dog urinated all over the floor, and had her head back (still laying on the floor) and she noticed the dogs breathing pattern increase to more deeper shorter breaths. After a minute or 2 the dog breathed normally, then released her head back to normal position, and she would not stand up on her feet for about an hour after that incident. Shortly later she was more off balance and eventually she even had trouble going down the stairs (once she slipped down the stairs too, and since then we have carried her up and down stairs).

Then one day she was so bad, she could not get up. She couldn’t even stand. We took her to the vet, he gave her a shot of cortisone, and a prescription medication to control the pain she was in. The pain medication the vet issued, was METACAM, and also advised us to continue the medicine to control her urine so she doesnt go in the house, PROIN (half of a 25 mg tablet 2x /day).

She seemed to get better- she could walk around again- slowly still, but much better than before.

She had episodes more often though (where she put her head back and had a spasm). She has always been eating well, until last Thursday- she had another spasm and didn’t eat much that night. Friday morning she had another spasm, my mother called the vet.

We took her Saturday morning- she still wasn’t eating that much. They ran blood tests and had hard time collecting blood, due to her veins. He said ran tests and said the problem is her kidneys, the reading showed very high numbers. He said with them numbers, he would expect her to have jaundice, but she did not. He said the reading may be slightly high because when trying to collect blood, the assistant spun the needle around while inside the dogs vein, to encourage blood to flow into the needle. He said if blood cells popped that can cause a higher reading.

So he said give the dog low protein foods, as any food with high protein are like poison, because since her kindeys are bad, she cant digest the food (unsure of what to think about that- I saw online documents which claim this info is “bad science”- when that discovery was made, it was only tested on mice- but dogs react differently).

But when my dog went to the vet that Saturday, he said to discontinue the use of the Metacam (for the Arthritis pain) because this can potentially cause adverse reactions and do kidney damage, since they are not in good shape, it may help her by stopping it. He gave us another medication instead of the Metacam. The replacement medicine was BAYTRIL 22.7 MG / day. Also due to the seizures, 2.5 MG of valium (every day for 10 days-its only day 3 now). He said to continue the bladder control medicine as well.

Well, she seams much worse. Last night we fed her noodles or macaroni noodles (for supper), and she only ate a little. In the morning we saw that she had thrown up the noodles. Today she is very weak, (im wondering if its because the valium has her buzzed, or maybe the lack of the pain med that she was on before (she was on Metacam before). But I also did more research on her urine control meds today (the Proin), and I see the doctor has her on a rather high dose of that, (the upper end of her correct dosage, for her weight its recommended to take 6.8 mg to 13.6 mg every 12 hours, she was prescribed 12.5 mg per 12 hours). I researched that overdosing on this stuff can lead to seizures and loss of appetite, so its possible that is what caused her to relapse on Thursday- maybe it was accumulating in her system and wasn’t being burned off fast enough- so it could have been a an OD I am guessing? So I am going to discontinue that altogether I think.

I took her outside a little while ago and she was so weak- I don’t think I ever seen her this week. I was wondering if anyone has any helpful info here, and I was wondering specifically if I should stop the valium and also possibly continue the Metacam, but don’t know because I don’t want to further damage her kidneys.

Any info at all would be appreciated, thanks.
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