Viktor is now 4 years old! We haven’t accomplished much in the last year but have inched towards personal goals of him having more dog friends. He’s had some interesting health challenges (here some of it!) and this year brought even more unexpected news.
At the beginning of summer, he starting to move abnormal (even for him. Here’s the day I noticed it – his back right leg isn’t moving in his usual way. It’s not as obvious in this video but it definitely felt wrong when we were training.
We talked to our general practice vet, we got radiographs, and we (I) prepared for news of CCL surgery. And then the orthopedic surgeon did the consult and told us that his knees are fine – this had to be a neurological problem, not a structural one.
A few weeks later, we went to see a neurologist and got some unexpected, but not surprising news. The vet gave us only a diagnosis of “ataxia” on paper but spent a lot time talking to us about possibilities. This showed up at around 40 months because this is the age when the nervous system finishes development. The ataxia could rapidly get worse in a matter of weeks or months or we may see a gradual decline over years. Or it might never change. MRI’s and other testing can be done but there is likely not any appropriate treatment or resolution, it would only give us a more precise diagnosis. Due to how invasive it would be and cost, the vet did not recommend we pursue those options.
And then the really interesting part was the vet talking about how confident he was that Viktor has an underdeveloped brain and how many dogs like this have very poor social skills. When that was brought up – I shouldn’t be surprised that that can happen, but I’ve not heard it discussed in regards to dogs before. How common is this? How do we better help these dogs (and their surely frustrated owners!)?
If this is the case with Viktor – it would explain a lot – he’s behaviorally very immature and acts much more like a puppy than an adult dog. His attention span and inpulsivity seems unusual to me when I consider the amount of training he’s had. His interactions with other people far more resemble a young puppy than those of a (playful) adult dog.
Our plan moving forward is to consult with our rehab vet as soon as we can get away to make the drive, we’ve tried an over-the-counter-brain-specific food, and maintaining/increasing body awareness exercises. The neurologist did not think that things could improve and he didn’t have specific next steps, but in the past our rehab vet has talked a lot about brain plasticity and I know that doing at least something will make me feel better even if we don’t have any easy way to measure the results.
The good news is that he hasn’t gotten worse since May and that the condition isn’t painful. I’m curious to see what happens and I wish I could justify doing an MRI to be able to see what’s going on in his head!