Your animal’s immune system

A Moving Drama

It was a night Belinda will have a hard time forgetting.

“Daisy? It’s after midnight — why are you making so much noise, girl?”

Click. On goes the bedside light.

“Oh, you poor thing! You’re all covered in bloody sores!”

Poor Daisy, the gregarious black Lab, couldn’t sleep because of her itch.

Incessant, maddening itch, all over her body, but concentrated in her rear legs and belly.

The more she chewed these areas, the more they bothered her and the more they got denuded and bloody from her constant gnawing.

Daisy kept Belinda up that night, and had her wringing her hands and calling me for an appointment the next day.

Nothing seemed to help: cool bathing, Rescue Remedy to calm her, pleading with her to stop. The best Belinda could do was take her out for a walk, which provided a temporary distraction.

Full disclosure: Daisy first saw me a year after she’d been diagnosed allergic to multiple plants and trees.

She had had “staph infections” repeatedly, allergy shots, and lots of antibiotics and steroids. None of this had helped her disease for any significant length of time.

Dr. WhiteCoat told Belinda that 2011 was a particularly bad year for allergies “due to the drought.” (!?)

Almost a year later, and Daisy was still itching too much, despite my having prescribed many well-chosen homeopathic remedies and changing her diet to fresh, raw, low-allergen foods.

She’d improved, but more was needed

This is not easy work, going for cure instead of just suppressing symptoms.

Belinda and I both had our hands full, trying to learn all we could about exactly how Daisy shows her sickness, how she’s responded to a remedy, and what’s her next best step.

Immune boosters are also a regular part of her regimen.

When Immunity Goes Off The Rails

When your animal has allergies, her immune system is over reacting to normal things.

This often manifests in the skin as itch.

It can start mildly, licking the paws regularly, maybe only before bed.

Maybe an itchy, waxy ear.

But, it can grow and get furious, as in Daisy’s case, where her life is largely taken up with her itchiness. Where sleep is interrupted for all involved.

Where anyone who sees Daisy pities her.

And where Belinda no longer wants to walk her in public, as too many people might think she’s a “Bad Mommy” for allowing this to go on.

They don’t know how hard we’ve tried to help Daisy, they just see the bare spots, the red sores, the stopping to itch in mid-walk.

As a quick aside, we live in a very disconnected culture, where many view symptoms as the disease itself, and do everything they can to make them go away quickly. There is no thought given to curing the disease responsible for those symptoms. We just want them to Go. Away. Now.

This view gets animals into deeper, more serious states of chronic disease, as I point out in Medicine Path. You need to be smarter than this, and find your pack who understands you’re working towards cure, and know that cure takes time but pays handsome rewards.