Trixie’s Terrifying-Sounding Nail Disorder

Last Updated on: 29th December 2015, 03:00 pm

There is one Trixie-related topic that I didn’t throw in the avalanche of stuff in the last post.

Years ago when I still had Trix, when I changed vets to the one she liked, the vet noticed that her nails were weird and would split easily. One time when she was cutting her nails, she nicked the quick. She had said at the time, “Those nails split funny. We should keep an eye on that, it could be an autoimmune disorder, or other scary things I don’t want to mention.”

It never got any worse, or never caught her attention again.

Then years later, after she went to Brad, she got some weird soreness in her feet, and her nails were sort of falling off or breaking funny. At first, the vet thought it was a fungal infection. Things seemed to get better, but at the end of last month, she had problems on multiple feet. Whenever they would try and get at the toenail and have a look at it, poor Trix would scream. They ended up sedating her and taking off the messed up nail, and are going to keep it around to see if any bacterial stuff shows up. But they think she has something called Lupoid onychodystrophy. Um, eek.

So apparently that would be the autoimmune thing Trix’s old vet was referring to. What a weird disease. They have no idea what causes it, it might be genetic or autoimmune, and the only way to *diagnose* it definitively is to lop off an affected toe. This won’t cure it, just make sure we know what it is. Yikes.

Thankfully, it sounds sort of manageable, and doesn’t evolve into anything else terrifying. So, hopefully, Trix’s nails will get stronger, and she’ll be ok. Phew. That was scary.

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2 Comments

  1. She’s not losing a toe. I should have explained. That’s the way to definitively diagnose it, but you can also diagnose it by observing clinical signs and ruling out other things that look like it. That’s the route Brad went.

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