Dogs with Arthritis – yes it’s a thing!!

It’s been a bit awkward these last few weeks, my dog hasn’t been acting like himself lately and it’s been extremely worrying for everyone involved. It’s been a lot of discussions and a lot of doubt and confusion about what is best for the dog and what could possibly be wrong with him.

This is actually a topic that I feel hasn’t been discussed enough. What do you do when your senior dog becomes old of age .. and he is sick.. but he’s not really showing any signs of Illness according to the “regular” illnesses you would expect at his age.. it’s more an advanced thing.. but yet again such a “normal” thing. I never even thought that this would happen. And it happened so fast. He literally went from relatively normal to emergency mode in just a few days.

It’s hard. It’s hard because you don’t know what’s wrong with your pet until you actually have it checked out. And just that procedure can take quite a bit of time. Dogs don’t even Let’s us know that something is wrong until something really is wrong.. their level of pain tolerance is out of this world… so when a dog lets you know it’s in pain or something is wrong, you better trust your instinct and follow up on that because we owe it to them to do everything we can for them to make their life smooth and pain free no matter what is the situation, right?!

I found myself waking up in the middle of the night with my dog panting hysterically in my face, it must have been about 4 am that night.. and I knew something was up. He was acting so hysterical and weird.

The normal and natural first reaction you would have had to this is of course that you’d think your dog is too hot or maybe even was having a seizure..

But some how I managed to get him calm and we slept until morning.. but the next day it started again and it was mid day and he was so disoriented, his eyes were not focused on me or anything and he was still panting.. So I called the vet.

Whilst at the vet we did an x-ray, ultrasound and bloodwork.. and the results came back and there it was… Marley has Arthritis..

Arthritis in dogs are actually quite a common age thing, especially with this breed (English bulldogs) it can be very very painful for the dog if it’s not treated. And I can’t stop thinking about how long he’s actually been in this critical pain.. because we didn’t know until it was actually an emergency. Poor thing.

We have been on one type of medication now for a week already .. and that didn’t work very well. the dog was still crying and still having these uncomfortable moments during the day where he’d wake up from naps and cry (scream actually from pain) not being able to find a comfy position .. hard to walk the stairs, barely wanna touch his food and hardly even wanna go out to do his potty business… and the panting off stress breathing was out of control… this was not sustainable .. this medication was Melaxocam. It works great for certain other dogs as a pain management but for Marley it wasn’t enough to get through a whole 24h a day with no pain. It barely helped him get through the night.

I literally phoned out to a lot of different clinics in Dubai looking for this other alternative medication for dogs with arthritis, it’s called Librela, and only 2 clinics actually had it. It’s been a week now since the first injection took place and I am hoping that now, he will feel less and less pain… if this medication doesn’t work and is not gonna make his life better to manage with the pain then we’re gonna have to reconsider how responsible it is of us to keep Marley with us, because one thing is for sure, he isn’t gonna have to live the rest of his days in pain like this. That is for sure. There are other drugs he can get as a pain management but I don’t know how receptive he would be to that.

If you’re a dog owner and I have a senior dog, I would suggest that u do a proper health check on your senior dog once it passes 8 years old, just to check up if everything is in order.❤️

I can’t stop thinking about if we just had Marley checked out before, then maybe we could have avoided this situation if we were able to give him the Injection prior to him actually suffering all this pain.

Let’s hope the medicine works for Marley ❤️ and I just wrote this to spread some light on this medication. It’s called Librela and it’s an injection to be given once every 30 days and it’s especially made for dogs with arthritis to help manage everything and remove the pain from them completely. ❤️ it has a success rate of 47% so it could work. Or it could not.. but we rather try everything we can and have hopes, rather than knowing that it’s something we could have done and not done it. ❤️

Here’s also an article of 10 things you can do for your dog with arthritis I found online : Read here!!