Arwen's Fight: Overcoming a GDV Emergency

On Thursday 2/20 around 11pm, my boyfriend and I went to bed, and Arwen was whining, getting up and laying down. I thought maybe she had played too rough with Rarity and hurt herself, so I was going to give her the night to rest and see how she was doing in the morning. She woke me up again at 2am doing the same thing, just whining when getting up. I took her out to potty, she drank some water, and went back to bed. At 4:30am, she woke me up whining, panting, and shaking very hard. She rolled over for belly rubs, and I could feel how hard her belly was. I got dressed, and she was excited to get in the car. I rushed her to Veterinary Emergency Group because it is closer than my own clinic, and on the way, she started crying heavily. As we walked in the door, she started retching and vomiting. They took an x-ray and confirmed that she was bloated and her stomach had twisted. I was absolutely terrified as I know how quickly you can lose a dog to GDV. Thankfully, her bloodwork looked really good, and so the vet was hopeful she hadn't lost blood flow to any of her organs. She was incredibly painful even with methadone, and it was breaking my heart to just sit with her while she was crying out. They weren't going to be able to get her into surgery for several hours, so I called every ER in our area, but unfortunately, nobody had availability to cut her, so we had no other choice. I spent from 5am-8am sitting on the floor with her, crying and fearing I was going to lose my heart dog. When they were finally able to do surgery, we were incredibly lucky that her bloodwork had improved even from arriving at the ER, and there was no internal damage. Her spleen initially looked congested but returned to normal once they untwisted her stomach. Her stomach itself pinked back up, and they were able to get her in and out of surgery in a little over an hour. I was so incredibly relieved and feel like someone was watching out for my sweet girl because having worked in veterinary ER, I've seen many GDV cases that were not that lucky. Arwen recovered beautifully, and when we went to visit her that night, she wagged her tail at seeing us and even ate chicken. The vet was so pleased at how she was doing, and because she continued that good progress, she was able to come home with us today. She's tired and not quite herself, but she ate and pottied and has been sleeping peacefully.

When they presented me with an estimate for Arwen's surgery, it didn't even matter what it cost. Arwen is worth any amount of money to me. I had to make a $12,000 deposit, and thankfully, I had a credit card with enough of a limit on it. I am a huge advocate for pet insurance, and Arwen is covered by Trupanion, but this visit is still several thousand dollars that was unexpected on top of some other unexpected expenses I've had come up. I don't typically do things like this, but I've had multiple people ask if they could help. Our family would certainly appreciate anyone who would like to. Hopefully, everything goes well with her recovery over these next 2 weeks, and we don't experience any complications. I'm definitely looking forward to it being over already, as Rarity misses playing with her sister already.