Misty's Story
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March 31, 2003
Hi,
I'm Misty and a lot has happened to me lately. I was doing shows
with my mom and dad, and I got a lot of 1st place ribbons in the year I
was in the show ring.
 Everything
seemed to be going along great then during the winter, I got a bladder
infection. I was put on antibiotics, but when they didn't work to clear it
up, my Dr. did an ultrasound to see if there was something else wrong.
It showed that I had developed a bladder stone, so my Dr. did surgery to
remove it, and had it sent away to Minnesota to have a special man that
knows all about stones check it out. When he sent the results
back to Dr. Glenn, it showed that I had some sort of liver problem.
Dr. Glenn then did a bile acid test, and the results were horrifying.
The readings that should have been no more than 25 were up over 300.
He couldn't figure out how I could be walking around so normal, and not be
bumping into things or having seizures. The Dr. suspected that it
was Liver-Shunt, and had mom and dad take me down to the veterinary
school, Purdue. Mom and dad just couldn't believe it because I never
showed any symptoms, and I was already 18 months old. I was not a
small dog, I weighed in at 6 1/2 pounds, I never got sick, and I always
ate my food. There were no seizures, or bouts of vomiting. So,
off we went to Purdue where they did some more tests and confirmed
that it was indeed, liver-shunt. I ended up one of the lucky ones
because the shunt I had was only a single one, and it was outside my
liver, so it could be fixed. There are some that are inside the
liver, and are many, many, little shunts that are too hard to fix.
Those are the ones that you can only feed special food for, and usually
shorten our life a lot. I had the surgery, and had to spend several
days away from my family while they made sure I was going to be OK.
The Doctors there were real nice, but I still missed my home, and I was
hurting a lot. They cut my belly from the breast bone all the way
back to my vulva. Mom asked them to spay me when they did the
surgery because Liver-Shunt is a genetic disease and can be passed on to
any puppies I would have had. When I did come home I had to eat
special food for a couple of months until I was healed inside. This also put an end to my show
career, which was really going good. Mom said now I will be a
cheerleader for my pack brother, Meeko, and my new pack sister, Cheyenne.
Even Champions can have health problems. If you want to read up on Liver shunt click here . See my Pedigree here , you can see that a good pedigree, does not mean that a puppy will be healthy.
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I
had even made it onto a yorkie calendar.
This is my calendar picture. Mom, Dad and Grammy were very sad that
my career had to end but they still love me very much.
