poor Leo is still holding on
My rat Leo sounds awful, but he still acts fairly normal during playtime, even climbs and jumps, and is eating, so I assume he's not suffering too badly yet. He's been getting twice weekly cortisone injections (or not exactly cortisone, but one of those related steroids, prednisone? I think), to help with the symptoms, because that suppresses inflammation and so makes breathing immediately easier, but after the first times I didn't notice the kind of fairly immediate easing. I've never had a rat being treated with these for weeks, but usually just one or two injections to tide them over to give an antibiotic time to kick in, only of course there are no working antibiotics for Leo anymore.
So with Leo on this for three weeks now I'm starting to worry about the side effects of that drug. The vet told me that his dose is not high or frequent enough to harm his immune system badly, which is of course what you hear most about with these, but that there are other side effects too, and that it would only be worth it, if it really still helps him breathe more easily. Of course even if I don't notice an improvement after each injection, like I'm familiar with when rats get it only once or twice, it could be that it still prevents the breathing from getting even worse. But I don't want to continue it unnecessarily either. So after I talked this over with the vet, we decided to skip the cortisone drug today to see whether he will get noticeably worse without it.
He still got the other part of his cocktail which is some sort of extract from a spider venom, which may help some rats with myco (if I understood it correctly it's not proven effective, but is one of those medicine things where some see indications that some drug helps sometimes without there being definite proof, but I'm pretty much willing to try anything my vet says has been seen to help some rats that is not outright impossible to do anything, like homeopathy).
Anyway, I'll be watching Leo closely until my next scheduled vet visit on Thursday to see whether the absence of the steroid will make a difference. I kind of hope that he'll remain unchanged, because then he could go without that drug and its risks, but I also worry that he actually needed it, and that he'll suffer through even worse breathing problems the next days.
So with Leo on this for three weeks now I'm starting to worry about the side effects of that drug. The vet told me that his dose is not high or frequent enough to harm his immune system badly, which is of course what you hear most about with these, but that there are other side effects too, and that it would only be worth it, if it really still helps him breathe more easily. Of course even if I don't notice an improvement after each injection, like I'm familiar with when rats get it only once or twice, it could be that it still prevents the breathing from getting even worse. But I don't want to continue it unnecessarily either. So after I talked this over with the vet, we decided to skip the cortisone drug today to see whether he will get noticeably worse without it.
He still got the other part of his cocktail which is some sort of extract from a spider venom, which may help some rats with myco (if I understood it correctly it's not proven effective, but is one of those medicine things where some see indications that some drug helps sometimes without there being definite proof, but I'm pretty much willing to try anything my vet says has been seen to help some rats that is not outright impossible to do anything, like homeopathy).
Anyway, I'll be watching Leo closely until my next scheduled vet visit on Thursday to see whether the absence of the steroid will make a difference. I kind of hope that he'll remain unchanged, because then he could go without that drug and its risks, but I also worry that he actually needed it, and that he'll suffer through even worse breathing problems the next days.