My dog Sam was recently diagnosed with laryngeal paralysis. LP occurs when muscles in the larynx start to lose their function affecting your dog's ability to breath properly.
To give you a little bit of background, Sam is 11 or 12 (I got him at the pound). He's been hypothyroid for several years, blew out his ACL abou 18 months ago, and has some arthritis. So he has several conditions going on.
In Sam's case (as in most from what I read on the interwebz), I noticed something was wrong during the hottest part of the summertime. Heavy panting because of the hot weather caused him to start wheezing any time he would exert himself or get excited like when I came home from work.
After several weeks of this, I took Sam to the vet thinking that maybe he had some kind of respiratory infection. Of course he didn't wheeze at the vet's, but I was prepared for this! I had made a video (posted below) of the wheezing, and because of that the vet was able to diagnose what was going on.
The good news is that with a few changes I have been able to greatly improve Sam's breathing without medication or surgery.
First, the vet advised me to shave Sam's coat off. He is a golden retriever, and he is beautiful. Here are his before and after pictures!
Many thanks to John for doing this!!
To be honest, I was horrified at first by how different he looked! He didn't look bad, he just didn't look like himself. Then I asked the Google if it was safe to shave a dog's coat and found all kinds of opinions that said it would never grow back, harm the dog, (insert your own scary internet thing here), etc. I called my vet the next day to ask him again if this was the right thing to do, and he assured me that it was and that it would be a tremendous help to my dog.
Boy, was he right! And, yes, your dog's hair will grow back. Here is Sam last week (about two months after his shave).
Sam loves to eat tissues, so I let him destroy an entire roll of toilet paper. Making your dog happy is cheap and easy!
Shaving Sam has improved his breathing tremendously by helping him to be cooler in the summer. I mean, really, who wants to wear a fur coat when it's 100 degrees outside?! (Shannon and John, feel free to rub it in here...)
Shaving Sam made the biggest difference of all, but there are a few other things that helped as well. When it was super hot, I left Sam inside during the day. I did adjust his feeding schedule to account for this, and if you feed your dog primarily in the evening, you dog will be fine waiting to potty until you get home after work. I had a black lab when I lived in an apartment, and I let her potty in the morning before I left for work, left her in the apartment during the day, and fed her in the evening. I did this for three years with Licorice, and she lived to be 15 years old and never had an accident in the house. After his shave, Sam seemed to be fine outside up to about 95 degrees, but warmer than that I left him inside.
The other thing I did was to install some soaker hose under the shrubbery along the back side of my house. Keeping the soil damp underneath your shrubs makes a tremendous difference in keeping your dogs cool, and it doesn't use that much water. (Incidentally, it's also beneficial for your house to keep the areas around the foundation damp. This will help prevent your foundation from cracking and causing your house to shift, so if it's very dry where you live, water your house occassionally even if you don't have pets.)
WHAT TO EXPECT: Before I knew what was wrong with Sam, he was wheezing multiple times a day, sometimes for several minutes at a time. After I made the above changes, he almost stopped wheezing altogether, even when it was still very hot outside. In the first week, he wheezed maybe once or twice. After that, almost never. Cooler weather obviously makes a huge difference, but in my opinion, the wheezing was almost self-perpetuating, and it seemed like once I got him more comfortable it may have helped reduce the inflammation of wheezing and struggling and allowed him to do better in all circumstances, even when he gets excited when I come home from work.
Here is a video of Sam wheezing from laryngeal paralysis. It is sad to watch this, but I wanted to included it in case you think your dog may have this so that you can see and hear what it's like. In my experience (and Sam's), it IS manageable.
A few other words... In the first couple of days after Sam's diagnosis, it seemed like he was getting worse every day. I was so nervous and worried. I called my vet and asked how I would know "when it was time," and he gave me what I thought was some solid advice.
He said that with laryngeal paralysis specifically, if the dog can recover he breath within ten minutes, he's probably okay. Longer than that is not good. And in the broader sense, he said, "Pick five things your dog likes to do, and when he stops doing three of those things, it's time."
That's direct, but infinitely more helpful than "you'll just know." Because I don't know that I will.
To end things on a happier note, here are a few more pictures of my sweet Sammy Sam. I love him so much...
Sam and me back in the day...
