APET Animal Shelter: Emergency Medical Grant Report
How did this grant help your organization and the pets in your care?
This grant helped us pay for the complex care of one French bulldog who came into our rescue with myriad skin issues.
How many pets did this grant help?
1
Please provide a story of one or more specific pets this grant helped.
Briella was a complex case of allergies, yeast infection, and much hair loss, and this had been allowed to continue for YEARS. When she was brought into us, she was bleeding all over from her skin, which had been scratched into a roughened hide and was not at all what a dog’s skin is supposed to look like.
We got her started, on medicated baths, terbinafine for the yeast, a Cytopoint shot to help stop the itching, and Apoquel twice daily. While this helped some in softening up the skin and ending the yeast infection, it was obvious to us that she had some kind of allergies that were still very, very active and that her immune system overly responded to.
So we took the very rare step of having an allergy test done (shelters don’t usually do this, as it’s fairly expensive) and we found out that she was allergic to several foods and all sorts of mites. So we started her on a diet of food she can eat and is not allergic to and we took the unprecedented step of starting her on immunotherapy in order to try to get her past these allergies for the long term. The treatment requires a long-term commitment, at least one year, to determine if it will actually help her immune system heal itself.
We could not have done this without the added funds that the Petfinder Foundation provided for us to be able to advance her care more than what we usually are able to do. I have included pictures of her and the places where her fur is coming back in and how much the skin has softened, especially on her belly and legs.
