Early Stages of Congestive Heart Failure (CHF)

Hey guys, My name is Dr. Laird here at Heron Lakes Animal Hospital. Today I'm here with Bella and bella is a 13 year old Chihuahua. Bella has a history of being diagnosed with an enlarged heart back in July of 2018. And we had started her on some medications to go ahead and slow down the progression of her heart disease. That particular medication is called Vetmedin or Pimobendin. And so we had her on that medication and she went ahead and she had been doing great. But recently, within the last few months, mom had noticed that she had started coughing and she started coughing more and more. And so I talked to mom, we had her come in, we did an ultrasound of her heart, we went ahead and did X rays on her chest and we checked her blood pressure. And so when we looked at the ultrasound of her heart, we did see that she is at the very beginning stages of congestive heart failure. And so what we are going to be doing is we're going to be adding on not only that Medin, but we will be looking at adding Enalapril, Lasix, and something called Spironolactone. These three additional medications are going to be really important in helping to extend her lifespan and having a quality of life. A lot of times people will say, hey, I don't want to do all these things to my dogs or to my pet. And so what I tell people is the most important thing is quality of life. If there is no quality of life, then it's not fair to them and you're doing something selfishly. But at this point she's doing great. And if we can go ahead and it's not stressful for mom to give the medication, then we can go ahead and provide a longer quality of life for Bella. Now, most medications will come in pill form. If you have difficulty getting those medications into them, you can sometimes have those medications either compounded, which means made into a different form. So sometimes they can be made into a liquid and other times they can be made into what is called a transdermal. Transdermal is typically a little cream that you rub on the inside of your of their ear and it gets absorbed through the skin and you don't have to worry about shoving some sort of pill or liquid down their throat. This is something that is not available for all drugs. So you'll have to check with your veterinarian to see if they know or to check with their local compounding pharmacy to see if it is something that is available effective. If you guys have any questions about this particular case, Please leave it in the comments. We will be doing a follow up with her in about a week or so and so you guys can see the progress on her if you follow us on YouTube. Otherwise, subscribe, share and thanks for watching. Have a great day and take care of.