Bailey went to the Vet

Well the visit wasn't as routine as I hoped besides the fact we were there for over 2 hours. Before I explain I'll let ya'll know she's fine so you're not reading this the whole time worrying Our vet is very concerned about distemper because he says he's seen a few dogs from the shelter where she came from recently who had it and we have no idea if she was ever vaccinated against anything until the shelter vaccinated her, but if she already had something such as distemper, those vaccinations wouldn't help. There is no easy test to run to test for distemper like they do for heartworms, so he did a complete blood count and her white blood cells are significantly elevated. They were 25 for those of you who may be good with lab values and are interested to know the number. The vet was happy about that though as this means she's fighting whatever she has and the white blood cells are usually elevated in bacterial infections and decreased in viral infections, and distemper is viral so maybe this means she doesn't have distemper. All her other counts were essentially normal. He says he wants to be aggressive with antibiotics, so we have Cephalexin pills to give 3 times a day, and gentamicin shots to give once a day. Thank goodness my husband is a nurse! He also said we could give a cough suppressant like Robitussin but I'm not so sure I want to do that as 1)She needs to expel all that gunk and 2)I want to be able to notice if the cough is helped by the antibiotics so I think we'll hold off on the Robitussin for now. He also mentioned her breathing was labored and to look to see if it gets better with the antibiotics, we're going back to the vet on Friday to get her stitches from her spay out, and they're gonna look at her then. From what I gathered from him, distemper is pretty serious and IF she were able to clear it on her own, it would always be dormant in her body and could flare up later on if she were stressed or immuno-compromised for some reason. So needless to say we're hoping it's just a bad upper respiratory infection and NOT distemper. He also said something else that worried me, he said we'll know IF she's going to respond to treatment when she comes back in on Friday. *sigh* I have a good feeling though and I think she'll recover. We've only had her a week, but we love this little gal! Sorry this so long, but I figured ya'll would want an update. Keep Bailey in your thoughts!