A couple of weeks ago, Siobhan went in for a routine comprehensive exam, and the doctor discovered a heart murmur during the checkup. I had planned for her to get a teeth cleaning the same day, but with the possibility of a heart murmur, they did not want to use any anesthesia on her until they knew exactly what was going on.

So a few days later, we went back to the vet for an ultrasound of the heart, and low and behold – heart disease (hypertrophic cardiomyopathy) and a grade 3 heart murmur (on a scale of 1-6). If you’re not familiar with this medical issue, it’s when the valves do not close completely and blood washes backward in the heart. It can cause significant medical issues, and eventually death.

When I was growing up, our dog Jini had a very severe heart murmur, but she lived for 14 years without many problems at all – so it’s not as if a murmur in and of itself is an immediate death sentence, however, it’s something that can be managed.

We immediately put Siobhan on heart medication, which slows down the heart and hopefully minimizes or prevents the backwash caused by a murmur. She will also have to undergo ultrasounds every 6 months so that the doctor can measure the heart muscle for any thickening.

Today we went back in for a checkup, since she’s been on the medication for a week – it went very well. The heart rate, even though she was nervous, was well within normal for this medication (100-150), and the doctor could not hear any sign of the murmur. That doesn’t mean everything is fixed, it just means that the medication is thankfully doing its job.

The main side effect we’ve noticed is that for the first couple of days on the medicine, she ran a bit of a fever, and was very lethargic – a normal reaction to a shot or medication. After a couple days of that, she is mostly back to normal, with just a bit of lethargy still present. It will take some adapting to this, since we’re used to her jumping through the air after things, swatting at Lasher during playtime, and tearing around the house knocking things over. The latter item we could do without .

I’ll be posting progress as we know more, but for now it’s wait-and-see until the next ultrasound, and hopefully the disease is slowing to a crawl.