• What caused Taz, the boxer, to limp? Could it be Lyme disease?
• Even with routine tick checks, Garcia, the bulldog, was diagnosed with anaplasmosis.
• When Hunter, a yellow Labrador retriever puppy, started having seizures, who would have guessed anaplasmosis?

What caused Taz, the boxer, to limp? Could it be Lyme disease?

I recently adopted my brother’s dog, a boxer named Tazman—Taz for short. Even though my husband and I never owned a dog before, we were excited to take Taz home. We have two young children and Taz immediately became their protector and favorite playmate. My younger daughter, Jocelyn, asks for Taz the minute she wakes up and my older son, Jacob, often reads to him before they both drift off to sleep. Needless to say, he has become a precious family member.

So you can imagine how we felt when Taz started to show signs of illness. At first he just seemed a little lethargic and less active than normal. Then he stopped eating all of his food, which he usually devoured in minutes. I figured Taz had some type of stomach problem from eating too much grass, but the last straw came when I saw him limping a little. When I checked out his legs, I noticed his left front paw was tender, but didn’t show any signs of being injured. All of this happened within a week, so I took him to our vet on a Saturday. She ran some blood tests and immediately diagnosed Lyme disease. My heart sank when I heard the news, and my family was devastated. To be honest, I never really thought about Lyme disease because we live near a fairly big city and Taz usually played in our backyard or at the local park. I guess I always thought dogs got Lyme disease from walking in the woods or in tall grass. The vet prescribed doxycycline, and we brought Taz home.

Fortunately, this story ends happily. Taz fully recovered within a few weeks of the diagnosis and is as happy and active as ever. What I learned from my vet is that animals like squirrels and mice that host ticks are coming into metro areas to find food. So now we use a tick preventative regularly and check Taz every time he comes in from playing outside.

I live in southern Maine and own two bulldogs—Bella and Garcia. This past spring, my husband and I spent several days camping near Mount Katahdin. Of course we brought the dogs and they loved it. They roamed the woods and played for hours with sticks and rocks. We even ran into a moose on one of our walks, and both of my fearless guard dogs ran the other way!

Each time we came back to the campsite, my husband and I took turns checking the dogs for ticks. Being in the woods, we found several and I became really nervous about tick bites and infection. Ticks can be really hard to find, so you have to take time to run your hands over your dog’s entire body to feel for little bumps. You should even check between their toes!

On my way back from the trip, I remembered that the dogs’ annual pet check was coming up in a month, so I decided to have them tested for Lyme disease at that time. When I was at the clinic my vet mentioned that there have been over 1500 cases of Lyme disease found in my local area. She also mentioned that there have been over 500 cases of a disease called anaplasmosis. I hadn’t even heard of it before, but I’m very familiar with it now because Garcia was diagnosed with it! According to my vet, anaplamosis is very similar to Lyme disease, and Garcia probably got it from a deer tick. I was shocked because he hadn’t shown any of the common signs of being sick, like vomiting or diarrhea. We started Garcia on an antibiotic and had him checked again in 6 months. To our relief he is now free and clear of the disease and remains healthy today. Get your dogs checked for tick-borne diseases regularly, even if they don’t show any signs of being sick!

I feel the need to tell every parent of a beloved canine this story in hopes of helping others.

My 5-month-old yellow Lab puppy, Hunter, began having seizures two days after receiving his rabies shot. He had five all together, the first lasting under a minute and getting shorter each time. We were out of town, so off we went to an ER clinic.

By the time we got there the seizures were over. They did blood work, and the WBC was a little elevated but not bad for a stressed puppy. The ER vet felt it was a partial seizure and not a grand mal seizure because he was still standing. She felt he was too young for epilepsy and too healthy for it to be a liver shunt, so she suspected it was an infection on the brain (cerebrospinal fluids).

Meanwhile, a friend urged me to have them run a SNAP^® 4Dx^® Test which is a quick in-office test for tick disease, including anaplasmosis. The ER vet did the SNAP^® 3Dx^® Test instead (which didn't include anaplasmosis), and it came back negative. Hunter had another brief seizure at the ER but was otherwise fine, playing tug-of-war, barking and being a total puppy. The clinic released him with valium to insert into his rectum in case of another seizure and strongly advised me to see a neurologist.

This all happened on a Saturday. On Monday morning I took him to my local vet and had a total PCR tick panel done. Two days later my vet called and told me he had tested positive for anaplasmosis. We got him on a high dose of doxycycline and he’s doing fine.

I would never ever have associated seizures with tick disease in a million years. I hope this story helps others that may be faced with the same circumstances. If the ER clinic had had that SNAP^® 4Dx^® Test, we would have known THEN.

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