NOTE: After we found out that Maggie was going to be ok, I promised my BLOG visitors that I'd share the littany of issues that Maggie has endured over the years. She is by far one of the most beautiful dogs I've ever had the pleasure to share company with; I obviously love her personality and desire in the field, as it resulted in us acquiring Belle. With all of that, she's damn lucky she's owned by us, because I'm not sure a non-veterinarian could have afforded her medical care over the years.

When we received this picture of the perfectly masked setter in the mail, both Chrissy and I were sold. As luck would have it, the first three picks in the litter wanted other dogs, two males, and the breeder was keeping a different female that he had fallen for. This meant that one of my hunting dog dreams was going to come true. A few weeks after these pictures arrived, I left Brainerd and headed to Green Bay to start our adventure into setter ownership. Little did I know, that one trip would result in so much heartache and at the same time a dog that placed an indelible mark on my heart over the years. I should have been suspicous that things weren't going to go well. As soon as I arrived back home I received a phone call. While talking on the phone, Emma managed to nail Maggie in the face. I thought for sure she was going to have some permitted damage with the force by which she was struck. It was a rocky start, but ironically the only time Emma ever showed any dominance to Maggie over the rest of their time together.

The first couple of months were uneventful. Then about three months into the relationship she started getting itchy, this would be the beginning of a lifelong battle with skin issues.

The notes in her chart say three areas of hair loss. Upon further exam of samples from her skin I found a parasite, Demodex. This is a parasite we see in young puppies, and occassionally older dogs. It is a follicular mite that lives in the hair follicles of all mammals but only causes issues in a select few. Of course, one of my dogs would be among these select few to be affected. At the same time she also had a horrendous ear infection. This first trip to my office took place when she was three months old. For the next year the chart is filled with entries trying to get to the bottom of the skin issues. Finally after months on the prescription diet, Iams Response F/P, she was normal on the skin front. She would still have seasonal flare-ups, and as is the case with most allergy dogs, she's never completely cured, but for the last few years she hasn't needed a prescription diet nor drugs during allergy season, making her skin issues manageable over the years. During those first few months with us she also had two episodes of very bloody diarrhea. At the time they occured we were pretty worried, in fact the first time resulted in a pannicked phone call from Chrissy to me at the clinic. She was rushing Maggie down because she had bloody stools. We eventually determined they were caused when she chewed on rawhide bones, one more thing she wouldn't be able to enjoy over the years.

The next major entry came on October 17, 2002. By this point she was just over a year in age. Our training was going less than spectacularly, as she was a run-off in the northwoods, and so essentially she hadn't been hunted. We lived out of town and were able to get the dogs on some nice runs in the country. On this fateful day in October she greeted us with a squinting, painful eye. Closer exam revealed a sliver in her eye. This was the first corneal foreign body for any of us in the practice, and would be the first of many in Maggie's career. She hadn't been hunted a day but had managed her first major "hunting" injury. We put her under anesthesia and removed the offending sliver. A month later she was squinting again, and so we were off to her first in a string of many specialist visits. The ophthalmologist diagnosed her with a stromal abscess...a condition more common in horses than dogs. Basically the foreign material had causes an infection deep in her cornea. The issue was resolving with the treatment I had already started and she was on her way to a full recovery. Ironically we treated this first foreign body as such a big deal. Now, I have seen so many between my two dogs that I'm able to often extract them on my own with just a little anesthesia for the eye.

Almost a year to the day, October 27, 2003, we again had a squinty dog at the breakfast table. This time the foreign body was in the opposite eye and I was able to get it out without any major side effects. The following month, while hunting in the grasslands, she developed a large swelling over her wrists. Multiple x-rays and diagnostic samples revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Because I couldn't accept this as an answer I kept digging. It turns out the swelling likely was the result of her repeatedly hitting that wrist on the bell I ran her with. Her previous history as a run-off had made me take every precaution in keeping tabs on her. That meant in her first real hunting season, I ran her with a bell. After this incident, and her proving she no longer would bolt on me, we left the bells at home.

We ended 2003 with one more eye problem. In early December she managed to create a large ulcer, or wound, on the surface of her eye. Thankfully there were no foreign bodies this time, and a course of topical antibiotics cleared things right up.

The 2004-2005 hunting season would be one that would be filled with some unbelievable issues for the little dog. It was an incredible year for me, and the only year I've managed 50 days in the field. That magic number is my goal every year, and I haven't come close to obtaining it the last four seasons. Looking back at the troubles we had with Maggie, maybe its better I not attempt it again?

October 16, 2004, was the opening day of pheasant season. My hunting buddy lined us up with a group hunt with his co-workers. Most of the cover we hunted was more suited to Emma, but at the end of the day we were going to work a draw that looked like it wouldn't be an issue for Maggie's hard-charging style...boy was I wrong. Just a couple hundred yards into the field she abruptly stopped and I could hear her sneezing uncontrollably. I rushed into the cover to find her spraying blood every where from her nose. I calmed her down to bring her blood pressure down and proceeded to carry her back to the truck. I rinsed her nose out profusely with saline, and after a lot of bleeding it looked like the initial emergency was under control.

Nasal foreign bodies can be difficult to deal with, because you can't see them on x-ray, and sometimes you can't see them with scopes. In fact, there was really no way of telling if there was anything still up there or whether she had rammed a stick into her nose and then had it pull out immediately. I placed her on antibiotics immediately. We were going to try a month's worth of treatment prior to taking her for a CT scan to try to identify if there was something in her nose or just a lot of damage. During that month she developed a lump in a lymph node and had a fair amount of discharge from her nose. Of course I didn't do the smart thing and rest her. We just kept on hunting.

My notes indicate that two days after the incident, Dad and I headed west for a praire bird hunt. The first day resulted in numerous points from the little setter. We ended up shooting several birds over her points, and I hoped this meant we were in the clear. Looking back I hunted her 10 more days during the month she was on meds, and during that time we shot a fair number of birds over her, all over points and some in pretty tough conditions.

On November 15, 2004, nearly an entire month after the initial injury, Dad and I were getting ready to hunt the last field on the end of a three day trip. I went back to the kennels to get Maggie ready, when she started sneezing uncontrollably. Thinking she actually may be going into a seizure I reached in to get her out and abruptly the sneezing stopped. I looked down on the tailgate and saw a mucous and blood coated stick. Unbelievably this little dog had hunted spectacularly for a moth with a stick up her nose. In the above pictures you can see how it compares in size. In the picture with the stick on her nose you can see just how far up in her sinuses the stick must have extended.

Then, shortly after a Christmas hunt, I noticed a small, pea-sized lump on the side of her chest. She had rolled down a hill during the hunt and I thought maybe it was just a swelling from an injury. Right after the first of the year, I was out of town on business for a couple of days when Chrissy called to say she thought the lump was changing. I headed for home on January 4th and was greeted at the door by an incredibly sick Maggie. Her gums were pale and the mass was about the size of a softball. I rushed her into the clinic and we sedated her and opened the abscess.

I knew we weren't in the clear, and I suspected that likely we were dealing with a migrating foreign body...again. We had to do this first surgery in order to get the infection under control and then do a second surgery once the area of concern was better identified. On January 16 we went back in. I started the surgery but quickly realized this wan't going to be a simple matter of going in and taking the little mass out. All of her tissue between her skin and ribs was unidentfiable. It blended into a mix of scar tissue and infection. Very quickly I was between her ribs and asked Tom to scrub in to give me a hand. During the surgery we heard the sickening sound of a balloon deflating. The frieable tissue had separated and created a tear into her chest. At the same time an abscess ruptured and the ooze of infection entered her chest. I was devastated thinking we were going to loose the little dog on the table. With the vacuum of her chest gone I began to breath for her with the anesthesia machine while Tom quickly closed the chest back up. He continued to remove some of the scar tissue, and with his last cut found the offending seed from a Canada Rye plant.

We closed her up, sucked the air out of her chest and prayed that the little dog would at least make it through the night. I put a pressure wrap around her chest to keep her from bleeding into the dead space between her skin and chest wall. Thankfully Chrissy was out of town on business that night, as I'm not sure she could have beared to see her little dog in such rough shape. I set my alarm clocks for every 15 minutes to make sure she was still alive. After one such check I turned the lights back out and heard her acting uncomfortably. I turned on the lights to find her bleeding through the bandages. I rushed her out to the kitchen to try to address the problem. I took the bandages off and had blood everywhere, before I could get it stopped I filled an ice cream bucket a quarter of the way full. I reapplied some pressure wrapping and stabilized the situation. The picture to the right was taken several days later. We continually battled the swelling that would occur post operatively over the next two weeks. During that time she never left my side, because I was worried that even a momentary lapse in watching her might result in her bleeding to death or opening the incision back into her chest. After a couple of months of antibiotics we could finally breath a sigh of relief. She had survived what I was sure would be her worst health scare. She still carries the scars from this surgery, because we ended up removing so much muscle from that area of her body.

With these issues bridging 2004-2005 we thought we probably had enough fun for one year, and thankfully the rest of 2005 was a much calmer year. She waited until December to have any issues. We of course had our obligatory corneal foreign body, which was easily removed. In early December 2005 I went on my first Missouri quail hunt. Emma managed to add the bird to her life list, and after that it was Maggie's turn to shine on a pointing dog's dream bird.

I put her down in the first field after lunch. We were hunting woody edges along harvest fields. The cover was thick and her one-speed, full-ahead style of hunting was less than ideal for the situation, but I wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to shoot a quail over her. We had barely started the hunt when she came out of the brush and I saw that there was blood everywhere on the snow. It wasn't slowing her down, but it was a little concerning for me to see this much blood spewing out of my dog. I called her in only to find she had ripped her ear through both layers of skin and the cartilage for almost an inch. I did my best to get the bleeding under control at the truck and clean the area. Unfortunately it was unseasonably freezing cold in Missouri, and every time I attempted to use tissue glue to close the injury and head off some of the bleeding it would freeze before ever getting on her skin. I was at a loss for how we were going to fix this in the field.

As luck would have it the guy we were hunting with was a clipper repair man. We rushed into his shop and used a cordless clipper to remove the hair from the wound. I used a little lidocaine to numb the edges and proceeded to suture her ear back together. She was done for the trip, but it saved us a trip into a bigger town to address the issue. That night I had her in the motel room tub scrubbing and cleaning her up from the day's adventure. I had a knock on my door and put her on whoa as I went to answer the door. I quickly came back to the bathroom only to find she had shaken her head, broke open the blood vessels and proceeded to paint the bathroom with blood splatter. I could hear the phone call the next day, "Dr. Spoo this is the Moberly police department, we found an incredible amount of blood in your motel room. Could you come in to answer a few questions." I quickly went to a local Wal-Mart and spent the next several hours spotlessly cleaning the motel bathroom. Likely the cleanest it had been since the place opened.

On the ride back from Missouri I had Maggie sitting next to me in the truck. I looked down at her foot and noticed and odd-looking swelling between her toes. Thinking it was just a small abscess I started her on Epsom salt soaks and started a course of antibiotics. After the soaks we would find numerous prickly pear spines working their way out of the bottoms of her pads. When the swelling between the toes just wouldn't go away I decided to explore the area surgically. Sure enough, deep in the swelling was a cactus needle over an inch long. The disaster dog ended the year with multiple problems once again.

Early in 2006 we reached the pinnacle of our canine problems. It was at the end of 2005 into 2006 that I began to suspect degenerative myelopathy in Emma, and in February of 2006 I found a small mass on Maggie. It was literally smaller than a grain of rice, and I suspected it was nothing. Initially I thought I'd just watch it, but when it would disappear only to come back I got a little worried. On a snowy day at the practice with a number of cancellations I ran home to grab her and we took the little mass off. It looked suspicious once we got it out, although it was so small I was certain we got it all.

I instantly got sick as I read the pathology report hot off the fax machine, Grade 3 Mast Cell Tumor. I had dealt with a lot of Mast Cell tumors in my career, but they had all been Grade 1 tumors in which most times removal alone is currative. It is times like this I hate having the knowledge that I do; a quick check of the literature showed an incredibly low survival rate. For a comparison, a Grade 1 dog's four-year survival rate was 93 percent, but for those with a Grade 3 tumor it was a mere six percent after surgery, and some studies noted that 97 percent of the dogs succumbing to the cancer during the first year.

I made a call to speak with the oncologist at Iowa State and had an appointment to have her worked up the next day. Maggie spent the first day being x-rayed, ultrasounded and having samples taken from her spleen, liver and bone marrow. They were staging her and looking for any evidence that the cancer may have spread. Thankfully all of the tests came back positive and we scheduled her to have a very aggressive surgery performed the next day. There was evidence that we had not gotten all of the tumor, and they wanted to make sure we got all of the tissue. In the picture to the left you can see the results of the surgery. A tumor that started out the size of a grain of rice resulted in them taking out a chunk of tissue roughly the size of a tennis ball. The ride home was very painful on the little dog, as she couldn't get comfortable after the aggressive surgery. Just to keep things interesting, about 75 miles from home, we blew a tire on the truck and shreaded going 70mph down the interstate. The spare was stuck as well, and I had to wait for AAA to send a truck out in the freezing weather. We made it home and she has beaten the statistics remaining cancer free, though not without several scares, yet today.

For most of 2007 she remained relatively healthy. We had a couple of new lumps show up, but thankfully everyone turned out to be a follicular cyst. In September Dad and I were getting ready to leave for a trip to Glacier National Park. On the Wednesday before the trip Maggie developed a case of diarrhea, nothing too out of the ordinary for her. By Thursday she wasn't responding to typical treatment and with a cross-country trip planned in two days I jumped into the diagnostics head first.

By Friday things had gone from bad to worse. She now had pure blood in her stools. It was like putting your thumb over a garden hose, they were just spraying out her back end. I called Dad and we cancelled the trip. In addition to the diarrhea she was also vomiting profusely. We had placed an IV catheter the day before and had turned our living room into the overnight ICU. We had done virtually every blood panel we could, from lepto to Addison's. I decided to do a barium study in case she had something blocking her. The barium didn't move out of her stomach, but thankfully I had a radiologist on the other end of the computer evaluating the films and she was pretty confident it was from a lack of movement and not because of an obstruction. I continued pouring the fluids and medications to her and started to worry that maybe her cancer had spread. Mast cell tumors can end up in the digestive tract and my worry was we hadn't escaped the statistics. We continued to run fluids through the weekend and I had made the decision I was taking her back to Iowa State Sunday night so that we could do some advanced diagnostics come Monday.

Sunday evening, when I went to feed the other dogs, she suddenly perked up, walked to her bowl and looked up like she was ready to eat. I capped the catheter and offered her water, which she held down. Over the next two days she returned to normal, or at least normal for Maggie. She was several pounds lighter and was going to be starting hunting season in the hole, but I didn't care. She was at least still alive. Once she was in the clear Chrissy commented, "I wish we could just go one year without a Maggie near-death experience."

Ironically she made it through the 2007 hunting season with no issues or injuries. Some of you who have followed the site know that we spent the last day of the season chasing prairie chickens and sharptails. This was the hunt that Emma fulfilled her upland trifecta with the prairie chicken. Well, the other side of that story was Maggie. I was actually reluctant to hunt her that day, becasue I was generally afraid that she would injure herself since we had made it this far through the season without an injury. The day ended up being perfect, and I ended the season with the setters honoring each other over a prairie chicken.

And finally we arrive at 2008, which for many of you new to the site is where the story actually began. This year's injury definitely gave me a scare, and I'm guessing from the previous history of this dog you can see why that was the case. Thankfully it wasn't cancer like they had previously thought, but rather a deep muscle injury no one had ever seen anything quite like it. She is my walking disaster of a dog, and I figure if something tragic is going to happen to a dog it is going to happen to her. Of course she would stump orthopedic surgeons who have been on the job for more than 20 years; I'd actually have been disappointed in her had she not. The leg injury healed nicely and she is finally starting to get back to a more normal routine. Today was the first day I actually ran her on it and I think she was quite pleased to get in a run.

She is by far one of the most beautiful dogs I've ever seen, and although she had an auspicious start to her hunting career, she has turned into one heckuva prairie bird dog. I'm sure that 2009 will be filled with some tragedy related to this crazy dog. I'd like to think more positively, but I do have a lot of evidence to support this theory. So the next time your dog needs a couple of routine shots, or does something minor like running through a fence, just think back to this article and be happy that at least it isn't as bad as Maggie. Is she worth it??? Do I really need to answer that?

Maggie's History Of Illness By Year:

2001: Demodex, food allergy and bloody diarrhea
2002: Corneal Foreign Body with stromal abscess
2003: Corneal Foreign Body, swollen wrist and corneal ulcer
2004: Stick up the nose and migrating foreign body (Canada Rye Seed)
2005: Torn ear and foreign body in foot (Cactus Spine)
2006: Grade 3 Mast Cell Tumor
2007: Hemorrhagic GastroEnteritis and numerous follicular cysts
2008: Entraped hematoma of gastrocnemius