Thanks everyone for your well wishes for Bryson! I wish I'm here to tell you he's all better and is snuggling up to my feet right now, but as you can tell from the subject of this post, the vet is still scratching his head trying to come up with an answer, while Bryson is stuck in his hospital cage room.
We visited him last night and this morning at this hospital, he looked so hopeful to see us, he perked up right away, probably thought he's going to come home with us and have a nice dinner (he's on strict bowel rest, aka no food no water, poor boy...).
This morning he didn't look quite as chipper, the doctor attributes it to some pain meds that they gave him just before we saw him. He was so lethargic he couldn't even greet us. To add insult to injury, he also had the "cone of shame" on (he was picking at his IV cath). It pains me to hear that he has no prospect of coming home today, and even tomorrow doesn't look that promosing...
Which brings us to the mystery of what's really going on. Well, the good news is he's stopped vomiting. The bad news is he's developed a nasty case of pneumonia overnight (or at least what they think is pneumonia given x-ray findings and a new fever, potentially caused by him aspirating his own bloody vomit at one point into his lung). That is in addition to still not knowing why he was throwing up blood to begin with and some mysteries in his lab tests. His blood tests show that he's not in an Addisonian crisis (which is good), but his potassium keeps dropping even after he's stopped vomiting for a while and he has a low specific gravity in his urine (no, not because he has short stubby legs as hubby said, it means his kidneys aren't concentrating his urine). They're leaning towards attributing that to an OD of Percorten (which I find perplexing, given that he's always had the same dose of Percorten, and he's had the last dose almost 3 weeks ago). Either way, the pieces just don't seem to be fitting quite right in this picture...
All they can do right now is treating his lung situation assuming it is aspiration pneumonia with antibiotics, protecting his stomach (which means no oral steroid for his Addison's, which I understand but still makes me nervous), and slowly introducing water, then food. The immediate goals are (1) to see him being able to keep down some water, food and oral medicine, (2) normalize his electrolytes (by supplements and holding Percorten, but we may not find out what the underlying problem is), and (3) seeing improvement in his presumed pneumonia (on x-rays and by symptoms). And this is just to get him stablized enough to get discharged, after which there will probably be numerous outpatient visits to follow up and figure out why all these are happening.
I know the hospital is the best place for him to be right now, I just hate that unsettled feeling that we don't know what's really going on, that he's all alone at this hospital, and that we won't be able to have him home anytime soon.
Oh Bryson, we miss you so, so much. I really hope we'll be able to pull our little human brains together and figure out what's wrong so we can help you feel better soon. Hang in there, buddy.
