Fanconi Syndrome, Part 1

One of my favorite movie scenes is from City of Angels with Nicholas Cage. This film alludes to the ancient hierarchy that assigns personal angels [lowest on the list of nine "breeds"] to individual people. The scene I like so much occurs during a liquor store robbery when two angels, invisible to the human participants, approach the clerk and thief and direct the flow of action as if they were moving energy in a T'ai Chi exercise.

I am not necessarily a Christian [too much exposure to too many religions, alas], and I truly believe that God is way too busy to involve himself in the daily affairs of either grasshoppers or humans, but every now and then, I feel the gentle guidance, the slight push, the nudge in a particular direction represented by the angels in the movie. The clerk could have antagonized the robber and gotten pistol whipped; the robber could have panicked for a different reason and fired the gun. Both men had free will, or so the scene suggests, but both had divine promptings that navigated them successfully through the ordeal.

I bring up this scene because I felt nudged the day I received the URGENT email asking for help fostering Java. I felt that ineffable prompting to respond. I didn't know why, but I felt [and I am typically an I-think kind of girl] compelled by something outside myself to answer. It turned out that in one way, it's a good thing I did.

The day that the coordinator dropped Java off, she said that she had observed him drinking and peeing frequently. Off hand, she said, "If you have test strips, you might want to check his urine." A basenji person knows immediately what would prompt this statement: the possibility of Fanconi syndrome, a rare condition that any mammal can get but quite prevalent from a genetic flaw in the basenji breed. Depending on the source, 10 to 15 of every 100 basenjis will develop Fanconi syndrome. The initial symptom is sugar in the urine, detected by dipping test strips for human diabetics into a fresh sample of dog pee. Java was guestimated to be a year old, and Fanconi typically kicks in at 3+ years of age. He was probably drinking as a sign of nerves, but it didn't hurt to test.

Basenji owners are supposed to test their dogs once a month because the earlier the disease is caught, the less damage there is to the kidneys. But like lots of things a person is supposed to do [save for retirement, avoid eating bacon cheese burgers, take the car in for an oil change every 5,000 miles], I didn't test my dogs every month. Checking Java's urine was a good excuse to test Yo-Yo and Bug's as well.

Imagine my shock when Yo-Yo's test strip started changing color.

Luckily, basenji folks are a well organized group. I have known as soon as I started researching the breed on the internet [after Yo-Yo's purchase, not before as basenji people would hope] that Fanconi syndrome was a possibility in her future and that a treatment protocol existed for handling the disease. I had long ago bookmarked the protocol in the "basenji" folder in Favorites; this time I read it with real interest, not just scanning as I had in the past.

I made a list of the recommended tests that Yo-Yo should have and visited my vet's office to make the appointment in person and explain my suspicions. This practice has three doctors: There is the Old Man who believes that a shot of cortisone will cure anything. He is actually Yo-Yo's favorite, but he's really only good for the yearly exam and shots because he long ago lost interest in diagnosis. The Old Woman, the most popular of the three, the only doctor that Bug hasn't tried to bite, has school so far in her past that I worried she would view a Fanconi diagnosis as The End and not be receptive to the protocol. Then there's the Young Snot, dismissed many times by clients, I'll bet, because of her age. But she had attended veterinary college at a time when there was a successful strategy for turning the disease into a manageable, chronic condition. So I made the appointment with Dr. Young Snot and left a copy of the protocol and tests I needed with the tech.

What happened at that visit will be the subject of the next post, for I have decided to chronicle each stage of Yo-Yo's progress with the disease here. Two really good stories about Fanconi syndrome and basenjis already exist on the web. One of them tells of a female dog who made it to 14.5 years of age on the protocol; the other is a story of a male who lives on the protocol still. I think regular updates of Yo-Yo's status—especially specific information about prices of tests and blood gas levels, what she's eating and how's she's responding to the protocol—will contribute to the overall instructional value of the web. God knows, neither of the two stories that currently exist prepared me for everything that happened the two weeks after that initial test strip started turning brown.