On the evening of Feb 20 2007, we took our 5 year old akita, Nikko, to the emergency vet in Lisle IL. He had been acting sick for a couple of days, growing obviously weaker and more lethargic by the hour. By the afternoon of that Tuesday he could hardly stand up and walk around, though he seemed to prefer sitting to lying down (as if he could not get comfortable unless sitting up). Before we took him, we gathered a stool sample from outside, and noticed that his urine was root beer brown (there was snow on the ground).
At the vet he could not even walk onto the lowered gurney they brought to take him upstairs, and had to be lifted onto it. After about 20 minutes my wife, my son and myself were ushered into an examining room. The doctor came in and said, "Your dog is in shock and renal failure, and we don't know why".
She went on to explain that in order to diagnose his condition they would need to first stabilize him via a blood transfusion and fluids, and that once that was done and the tests to diagonse were done we were looking at at least 3-6000 dollars worth of treatment over the next 3-5 days, and even then she wasn't sure he could be saved.
Nikko was humanely euthenized later that evening, for a reasonable 1800 dollars. That's just the financial cost, and it isn't the entire story. But they are the salient points...
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