Help TenSoon beat endocarditis and pneumonia

Hi, everyone. My name is Ellen, and my precious, darling TenSoon has been diagnosed with endocarditis and pneumonia.

He’s an Irish Wolfhound, only 3 1/2 years old, and he’s the sweetest, gentlest, most sensitive marshmallow. He’s a gem, my official sidekick and my unofficial therapy dog.

It started Thursday, June 2, 2022, when I noticed he was limping. We thought he had slipped and injured his leg, but our local emergency vet didn’t find anything wrong. It got worse over the next few days, and we were able to take him to our regular vet on Wednesday, June 8, and they found pain in his back. He worsened even more overnight and on Thursday June 9, we ended up bringing him to a specialty emergency vet clinic that’s over an hour from our house, where we could have access to a neurologist and a cardiologist, as well as excellent emergency and intensive care staff.

Friday morning at 1am, I got a phone call that my baby boy had a seizure. They were able to bring him out of it, but he wasn’t doing well at all. He was too sick Friday afternoon for an MRI, but a CT scan showed a bleed in his brain, caused by his blood vessels being inflamed and leaking randomly. That bleed is what caused his seizure. They also discovered that one of his heart valves is infected, a condition called endocarditis. It’s pretty rare in dogs.

They also diagnosed him with pneumonia—when he had the seizure, he must have aspirated some back into his lungs, where it turned into another infection, so now we’re fighting two infections instead of just one.

We’ve made it this far, and TenSoon has been getting better and stronger each day since they started treatment with antibiotics. We’re not out of the woods yet, but we’re making baby steps in the right direction. We’re praying and hoping he makes a good recovery and we get to bring him home soon.

TenSoon is our baby. There was never any question of whether or not my husband and I would fight to save him—we would be utterly lost and crushed without our boy.

But emergency veterinary medicine, intensive care, all the diagnostics and medications and the ‘round-the-clock care adds up very fast. We’ve racked up more than $20,000 so far, and we’re not even close to done yet. We have at minimum several more days in the ICU, and we don’t know how expensive that will be yet.

Our pet insurance won’t cover it all, and we need help. We feel terrible asking for money, especially with how things are right now, but we would greatly appreciate anything. Even just a dollar or two, if that’s all you can spare.

We know we owe a lot of money for his treatment, but TenSoon is worth it. There is no love quite like the love of a dog, and TenSoon is the very best we could ask for.

Please, if you can, help me afford to save my dog and bring my best friend home.