Also I wasn't quite familiar exactly the conditions Lem had so maybe you can break it down for me.
Hi Jen --
Sorry for the delay in responding -- I've just been buried at work lately.
Newfie maladies -- where to begin?
Entropion is a condition where the lower eyelid is just too big, and it flops over - inward - and rubs on the cornea everytime the dog blinks. Left unrepaired, obviously, it can eventually lead to serious vision problems from the damage to the cornea.
Joint issues -- hips, knees, elbows, are all pretty self-explanatory.
Newfies also have a propensity toward SAS (sub-aortic stenosis), which is where one of the valves in the hear doesn't work quite right, and it basically will stick open, I think it is. This can happen any time, and sometimes the episode will last a couple of minutes, but then it just starts working again and all's well until the next episode. I understand there's really nothing you can do during one of these episodes, other than watch, and hope, and cry. Luckily, we don't have that, and many breeders will euthanize a pup who has this (it can be tested for at like 8 weeks or so) -- other breeders will just give those pups away to good homes.
The last one I mentioned was bloat. It's most common in bigger breeds with deep chests, but Newfies have been known to have it (we had a friend that did, and lived to tell about it.) Basically, I guess horses and cows can get it too, it's where the stomach fills up with gas and flips over on itself (that part's actually called "torsion"). It's a fatal condition, in a very short time frame if you don't get t the vet, and even then, it's an approx. $5000 surgery with uncertain odds. I guess the intestinal tissue begins dying quickly, because it doesn't get any blood flow. But there is a pretty simple procedure where they go in laparascopical
ly and tack the stomach to the abdominal wall (actually they wrap it around a rib, too), so that it can't flip over. Lem was going under anaesthesia anyway to remove a small anal polyp and for an exploratory look at the alleged third kidney (false alarm -- just a floppy second kidney that showed up in two different positions on an ultrasound), so we just had that done at the same time. It's called a gastropexy. When we had our male neutered, we did the same thing, since he was already under, and it's a pretty basic procedure.
Those are the biggies that I know of.
Again, sorry for the long post.
Tad
