Hello, new here. I was hoping someone may have some insight into some issues our big girl is having. This is a little long winded, but I will try to keep it to the point. We have a malamute that is approx. 6 to 7 years old (she was a rescue so not sure). Recently, she has been experiencing what we believe are back problems, there may be some neurological problems as well. About a month ago she had an episode where she just randomly started acting very "drunk". She was stumbling around and was having difficulty standing. We took her to the emergency vet and his only conclusion was that she ate pot. We had just moved into a new house and we don't smoke pot, so this is beyond unlikely and we have no other poisonous items that she could have access to. When this happened a friend was in town for the weekend and we had 5 dogs at the house and none of the other dogs had any kind of issues. We later took her to our normal vet and he said it could have possibly been a patty seizure. After doing some more research it seemed to us to be a stroke. That seemed to be what most accurately described what we saw. She did seem to get over it by the next morning and was back to her old self. A week or so later she tweaked her back and would yelp whenever getting up or down. This has happened once before, a couple of years ago, and we got her some anti-inflammatory and pain killers and she seemed to be ok. Now, we are a week or two past that and she is exhibiting some very strange behavior for her. She has become very lethargic and doesn't seem to want to go outside hardly at all. Strangely her appetite and potty habits seem to be totally normal. She has also started whimpering at night when we are just watching tv. She will seem fine all day and then will lie down at night and start to lowly whimper. We started giving her the tramadol again and it seems to help. We have also noticed her tail is down almost always, which is highly unusual for her. She almost always has it curled up. Last night we noticed she is not even lifting it to defecate now. We have had xrays done because the vet originally thought she may have discospondylosis, but they came back good. He said her back end really looks great. He referred us to a specialist to get a neurological exam, which we are doing in about a week and half. Aside from that we are at a loss on this. I just wanted to get some opinions from other people they may have seen something like this before. Thank you in advance.
Check out vestibular disease in respect of her first episode - if it was this, you should have noticed her eyes rapidly going from side to side. As for the other problem, it sounds complex and it could well be a lot of testing before the cause is known, but I hope you get to the bottom of it quickly because it sounds like she is in some discomfort with it x
