Update on Sammy’s health

I know the many people who read the story
about Sammy going on antibiotics will want to know how it
turned out.

Speaking as someone who knows him, he’s much better. (You
can’t tell from this picture — it’s morning nap time.) His
energy level is higher, he isn’t having accidents in the house, he
doesn’t seem to be drinking as much, and while he’s still peeing
more than he used to, he can often get across the street before he
has to do it.

The vet called on Tuesday with the results of the tests he took
after finishing the antibiotics. It turns out that there is not
an increased level of antibodies to leptospirosis, so he probably
didn’t have that, so we don’t have to worry about the liver and
kidney damage that would have done.

So the likely thing is that he had some kind of infection that
the antibiotics he took for the possible leptospirosis cured.

The vet says his urine is still pretty dilute, so it’s likely
that there’s some kind of kidney malfunction that isn’t showing up
on the bloodwork. He would have liked to do an ultrasound to see
if there’s a kidney problem that that could find, but that didn’t
sound reasonable to me.

It’s likely that the kidneys aren’t working as well as they
used to, but he also has (according to the vet) a “muffled
heartbeat”, and he’s about to be 13, so it seems to me quite
likely that something else will kill him before whatever the
ultrasound turned up, even if it was something treatable.

I get lots of high-tech modern medicine for myself, but I’m
likely to live another 30 years, and I have health insurance to
pay for it.