Hello! My name is Leah and my husband is Eric. We are trying to raise money to help cover medical expenses for our dog Dotty. It has been a very long and stressful couple of months so I will try and keep it short.

Back in February of this year, my husband rescued Dotty from the parking lot at his work in Raleigh. We reached out to local shelters and apartment complexes, checked Facebook community threads and even had her scanned for a chip. But we had no luck finding any owner, so decided to take her in and love her.

After we decided to keep her, we took her to the vet made sure she was healthy, caught up on all her vaccines and bought her the cutest little polka dot collar.

At first we thought she was just a happy healthy year old puppy. All summer we played and took her to the park with her senior sister Roxy, and cuddled her every night.

We quickly realized that she was actually only about 6 months old when we found her, because she ended up going into heat about mid August. While she was in heat she took a turn for the worst. Fevers, full body aches and lethargic. We quickly took her to the urgent care where they ended up referring us to a local animal hospital.

After a three night stay and every test imaginable, we were discharged and the diagnosis was just a fever of unknown origin. They told us we would need to follow up with her primary.

After following up with the primary, they decided that she needed an emergency spay. They were concerned that she may have had an infection in her uterus. The following day we had her there for surgery.

Thinking that we had solved the issue we took Dotty home and she seemed like she was greatly improving. However, at the end of her medication cycle, we noticed that she started to decline again.

We immediately took her back to her primary care vet and they were stumped. They gave us another two week round of antibiotics and said that if she did not improve after this, we would need to take her to a specialist hospital for further testing.

Like clockwork at the end of her two weeks she started to decline again. Except this time she was losing mobility in her back legs and the lymph node in her neck had swollen to the size of a baseball. That came on very fast, and we knew we needed to get her help. We ended up taking her to specialty animal hospital, and after testing there, they determined it would be better to take her to NC State Veterinary Hospital.

At this point we are a little over a month in trying to figure out what was wrong with her. We felt so bad especially because she was still just a baby. Our baby. And we would anything we could to save her.

They decided to keep her there for three nights in the ICU at NC State, running tests and taking specimens. After they were able to get her feeling somewhat better they discharged her with a medication regiment, a sling for us to help her walk and education on how to express her bladder.

After a couple of days we started to see improvements. Her back left leg gained mobility back, and she was trying so hard to get the back right leg back as well. She was able to start using the bathroom outside again and things were looking really hopefully. However, about a week after that she started to develop a cough.

After a follow up at NC State, they decided to try a different antibiotic. At this point we had already tried several different antibiotics but nothing was working. With hopes that this one would work, we took her home and continued her therapy.

Dotty seemed like she was improving from this antibiotic after only a couple of days.

I don't know about y'all but we let our fur babies sleep with us in bed. Dotty was big on cuddling, so every night we would lay her in the bed between us with her head on the pillow.

Last Thursday night October 16, 2025, we did our regular bedtime routine and laid her between us. When we woke up the next morning, we discovered that she had passed away peacefully. Our hearts were broken. Our sweet little baby was gone.

After MRIs, x-rays, ultrasounds, extensive lab work and testing, cultures, multiple types of medications, and a three day ICU stay, they were still unable to figure out what was going on. They thought maybe it was a bacterial infection but were not really sure.

We ended up taking her back to NC State for cremation and we aloud them to take extra tissue samples and study her so that maybe they could figure out what it was. Our hope is that if this ever happens to another dog, they will know exactly what they need to do to save them.

Any financial assistance you can give would be greatly appreciated. As you can imagine this was extremely expensive.

Thank you,

Leah & Eric