Hi, i just gave my dog Zack, almost 13 year old cavalier king charles spaniel, his first dose of 20mg Galliprant. the vet gave it to me for him on Thursday but i have wanted to avoid NSAIDs, they can be gnarly. Fortunately he’s been healthy and hasn’t needed meds for anything, except he has advanced mitral valve disease and was prescribed Vetmedin a year ago, i have not started that yet because his heart was compensating so well, he is still not in heart failure–something that could happen at any time, or might not.
I have a recent prescription of Vetmedin but have not started it yet, partly because another problem started, about 3 weeks ago, Zack started going downhill suddenly, i thought it was heart failure but went to cardiologist and he said still no sign of it, symptoms Zack was having included moving stiffly, and difficulty with eating. He had a good appetite but showed hesitation and reluctance to eat, and had lost a couple of pounds, from 25 to 23.1, since his March cardiology eval.
Something very wrong, before this, he’s never had any sign of osteo-arthritic symptoms, and i didn’t think of it at first, thought it was heart failure. i took him to his regular vet Thursday as he kept declining, he stopped wagging his tail, it was hanging down, never seen that before in his life, and losing interest in the things outside that he used to bark at and not wanting to go out, and sometimes he only ate when i fed him by hand. As of now it’s like that all the time, i tip his bowl up so it’s easy for him to get it out and he only licks it, he doesn’t bite it but i shovel it into his mouth with a plastic spoon. He eats hungrily. He eats his normal two portions a day and wants more . He eats hungrily in the morning and late at night but decidedly doesn’t want food all day long–if i offer it, he goes the other way, even though i’m not trying to force it on him or anything.
He seems to sleep through the night, i’m sure he wakes but goes back to sleep as he does all day, he also just lays wake, looking at me, which is normal, he was always a dog who didn’t sleep a lot, he’s very interested and sociable. When these symptoms started, he stopped sleeping in my room with me and now sleeps in the bathroom on the floor, not on the rug, he pushes the rug aside.
The regular vet said on Thursday that his spine is in pain and possibly his neck. she said his abdomen was distended. She prescribed Galliprant.
He had a prescription of Rimadyl about 10 years ago for a pain that made him limp and was thought to be in the neck but they never could locate it with X-ray or palpation. So, i gave him the first Rimadyl and went to work. i came home that night and found that he had vomited blood and had no appetite and was not his happy self. Of course, i stopped the medication, besides, i usually like to see if things go away on their own. So after the Rimadyl caused him to vomit blood and act like he felt really bad and i stopped it, i can’t remember if he had had one dose or two, i went back to the vet and he told me to keep giving him the Rimadyl. Of course, i didn’t. He said the side effects would go away. but after the alarming symptoms, i had googled Rimadyl and there were some very sad horror stories—not that most dogs on it will have the worst results, but since mine had a bleeding stomach, that was enough of a red flag for me. And it bothered me that the vet would say to keep giving it to him. He is the owner of the practice, it has several vets and i’ve had a few i like very much, but i never saw him again, by my choice, i think differently from how he thinks
The vet i’m seeing now is his daughter. i like her. She knows how i am afraid of NSAIDs after the Rimadyl, for my dog, i’m not saying most dogs will have a problem but mine had it right away which is probably unusual. anyway, all these years he’s been healthy.
Now he is having symptoms of being in pain that is making him have difficulty moving.
So, his regular vet said Galliprant is safer. She gave me a sample of 5 pills. it made made me uncomfortable to give him a 24 hour release pill, i would rather have shorter duration so that if anything goes wrong, it can be stopped right away instead of a more delayed ending of the effect.
So i’m freaked out, i just gave it to him. i can see no sign that he’s getting better from whatever it wrong with him. i read most of the posts on this discussion and i hope he will have the result of the medication taking the pain of whatever is wrong with him away.
The day after i saw the vet, i took him to a holistic vet and he had an acupuncture treatment. At the first vet, he was given cold laser treatment. Yesterday, Saturday, i had him back for another cold laser treatment. He seemed better yesterday than for several days before, not sure if it was related to the cold laser, but he wagged his tail for the first time. Other than a few small signs like that, and starting to make an effort to jump into the car on his own (but i intervened and helped him, he continues to be awfully fragile), he is still very messed up. When we got home, as usual, he had a hard time walking up the one step from the back yard into the house, which he was just jumped over before this thing. it’s clearly very painful for him to make that step, it’s his spine, the pressure climbing the step causes, i think. The vet didn’t do X-rays because he just had some in March. i am going to get X-rays and an ultrasound this week.
Today i got him another cold laser treatment but he isn’t any better. No tail wagging today though he did show a weak impulse to jump into the car which i took over. Even when he’s well, he’s had a hard time with that jump. Maybe he injured himself trying to make it one time, i wasn’t paying attention and don’t have any theories of what happened to him.
i’m scared of the Galliprant. i hope he will have a miraculous disappearance of his pain like some people have reported. i appreciated the ideas and suggestions about giving lower dose and skipping a day every now and then to try to avoid serious gastro-intestinal issues. i gave the whole 20mg tonight and will do that for a couple more days at least.
Also, the vet put him on Clavamox, a broad spectrum antibiotic. This was because she did a complete blood panel, everything was normal except BANDS, which i had never heard of it, it’s part of the blood cell count and his was a little elevated. The holistic vet didn’t think it was significant–but i have used Clavamox/Augmentin over the years and never had any problem with adverse effects so i have started him on that tonight too. Both the antibiotic and Galliprant can cause GI symptoms, so if he does get them, i don’t know what to do.
Normally, he has regular and firm stools, but the other day i saw him having difficulty going, it looked like he couldn’t bend his spine, his back was straight rather than the usual curved back they have when they poop. His legs were in the normal hunched pooping position but his back was straight so it looked like he was standing up to poop. And he didn’t succeed. The next day he had a normal stool, i couldn’t see him because plants were in the way, as far as the position he was in, but it was firm/soft, but the end of it was getting to an unformed condition, and then there was a separate liquid puddle.
Since Galliprant is so new, only been around about a year, i am wanting to stay tuned with pet owner reports and am glad to find this discussion.
