Everyone who meets our sweet Copenhagen loves him, so we’re hoping those people that love him and us will help us out a little bit with this unexpected cost.

10/27 about 21:00, we noticed Copey Boy was acting a little funny. He has a sensitive tummy, so we just thought his belly was hurting and he needed to puke. He eventually laid down and went to sleep, so we did too.

At 3 am on 10/28 I heard a noise and woke up. I found Copey scooting around using his front legs to get around. He wasn’t using his back legs at all. I got up to check on him better and realized he had also pooped on the floor. Knowing what we know now he likely had no control over this and it was from being in pain. I knew he wasn’t feeling well so I just cleaned it up and started to check on him.

Jake woke up and we started talking about what to do because we realized he wasn’t moving his hind legs. Our emergency vet was closed, so we decided to take him to our vet when they opened at 7 am.

We got the girls up at about 5:30 to get them ready for school so we could drop them off at the school’s before care as soon as they opened. However, it soon became clear that whatever was going on was worse than we thought. Jake went to help lay him down and he started yelping like I’ve never heard and went stiff as a board. We really thought he wasn’t going to make it much longer and we were going to have to put him to sleep. We decided to bring the girls with us so they could say goodbye if it came to that.

At the vet we figured out he was actually essentially paralyzed in his hind legs and that general area. He also had no pain response, light or deep pain, indicating he had no feeling. The vet told us about IVDD, Intervertebral Disc Disease, and that’s what she was thinking it was based on how he was presenting. We did X Rays and also found out he has pretty bad arthritis in his spine around the same area. We were referred to Louisville Metro Vet. Everything we were seeing didn’t have a great prognosis but we wanted to go anyway to talk to the actual surgical team since they specialize in injuries like this.

They assessed him and said his condition isn’t great, he likely does have a severe case of IVDD, but an MRI would confirm and we discussed surgery. The surgeon said Copey would have about a 60% (50-70%) complete recovery. Time was on our side because they said it’s best to do surgery in under 24hrs after presenting with these symptoms. However, the surgery would be about $8,000, possibly up to about $10,000 if it became complicated.

We love our Copey and will do anything for him, or our other dogs. But we were not prepared for this expense. We were told IVDD is silent until it isn’t, so we couldn’t have prevented it.

If you would like to help us with this financial cost, Jake, myself, Eden, Ivy, and Copey would like to thank you so much in advance. We’re hoping that after surgery and with a few months of recovery he’s able to get back to his sweet and stubborn self that we all love so much.