A sick pet, a witty vet and a new word

Idiopathy. 

That was the new word. I came across it because our toy poodle Luci fell ill. Poor girl. She’s all heart: affectionate, companionable, seeking us out almost to the point of neediness. So it was sadly ironic that it was her heart that gave her trouble.

She was having long and painful coughing fits, fighting for breath. She was off her food, which is quite extraordinary for her. And she was too tired even to jump up onto the sofa next to us.

At first, a young vet in our local clinic decided that she had kennel cough and prescribed first an anti-inflammatory, and then an antibiotic. It would later turn out that not only was the diagnosis wrong, the treatment made her condition worse. Fortunately, the third time we took her in, a colleague became suspicious that we were dealing with something entirely different from kennel cough.

What she had was fluid filling the space around her heart, and indeed around her lungs. The pressure it generated was preventing her heart beating properly. It even made it difficult for her to breathe.

We found ourselves driving to the nearest veterinary hospital with people competent in cardiological problems. Nearest, but not that near, since it took twenty-five minutes to get there. And competent though not actually cardiologists themselves, it being late on a Friday night, and the veterinary cardiologist having headed home for the night, and indeed the weekend.

Fortunately, there was an excellent and likeable vet on duty, a young man from the Canary Islands, who does a week on duty at nights at the hospital south of Valencia, and then goes home to his Mum for a week. He expertly applied a syringe and extracted the fluid that was causing poor old Luci so much pain. Sadly, the news wasn’t encouraging: the fluid around her heart included blood. There was nothing good about that.

It was a bad weekend, above all for Luci, who spent two nights at the hospital. And for Danielle, who made the 50-minute round trip three times even before the Sunday evening, with either me or our son Michael as company. Then, not long after her return home on Sunday, Luci had a horrible episode which looked like a stroke, where she went stiff as a board and pretty much lost consciousness. That had us back down at the hospital yet again (all three of us this time). However, after a battery of tests that revealed nothing, we took her home again. She spent the rest of the night in reasonable calm.

Poor sick Luci getting tenderness from Toffee

Then on Monday we saw the cardiologist. He was great. Cheerful, kind, gentle and, above all, informative. Well, as informative as the information at his disposal allowed him to be. 

The most likely cause of Luci’s problems was a tumour on the heart. That would have been, in effect, a sentence of death. But he found no sign of a any kind of growth and told us he thought the chances of its being cancer were very small.

However there was no trace of an infectious disease, or of trauma, or of a toxin.

That’s when I learned the word ‘idiopathy’. Perhaps, after so many years working in and around healthcare, I should have known it before, but I didn’t. Its roots are Greek, and at first glance it sounds like the disease (‘pathos’) of being an idiot. That could be the kind of thing afflicting those who still think Brexit has been good for Britain, in the face of all the evidence.

But the word ‘idiot’ comes from ‘idios’ meaning of one’s own, because an idiot is (literally) someone who is wrapped in a world of his own. Again, that reminds me of Brexit. I don’t know what world is inhabited by those people who thought they could trust men like Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson, but it certainly isn’t the world I know.

In fact, putting the two Greek words together gives us a term for a disease that is its own cause. You might think that this is like a self-inflicted wound. Rather of the kind suffered by people who voted for Brexit in the first place.

It turns out that, in the context of the cardiology consult, it really was the term for a disease which seems to have caused itself.

“In other words,” the cardiologist told us with a winning smile, “it means that we haven’t the faintest idea what caused the problem.”

I appreciated his honesty. And felt a little encouraged. At least, nothing said beyond any doubt that what Luci was suffering from was life-threatening. She’s not out of the woods, and we’re still far from relaxed, since we realise that this mysterious ailment could reappear as suddenly and with as little warning as the first time. But at least there’s no reason to despair for now.

Meanwhile, I’ve learned a new word. Idiopathy. A disease we can’t begin to explain.

Hey! Doesn’t that sound like Brexit too?