Gata and Heat Sensitivity or Exercise-Induced Collapse or ???

Gata continues to worry me. What I have been trying to minimize by describing as "heat sensitive" is probably something much more akin to Exercise-Induced Collapse. The only good thing about it is that they have done a lot of research on it since the last time I looked into it and have a much better understanding than they did at the time of Gata's first collapse over 3 years ago. They have a genetic test for it now, but it seems to be pretty specific to the retriever breeds. There is something else like it in Border Collies that is definitely NOT the same thing based on genetic markers. As far as I can tell they don't know what it is yet. But I will try to call the University of MN to find out more.

Anyway, Gata had another incident of it at about 6:00 Wednesday morning. It was neither hot nor humid. She's been off since then as I have been doing my own research and trying to figure out how to proceed.

I stopped at the local vets office on the way home yesterday, on a whim. I don't like the set up of their facility or the way their tech tries to manhandle the dogs but did like the vet. And since he had worked at the NIH I thought there might be a pretty good chance that he would be academically inclined. He wasn't there so I ended up talking with the owner of the practice. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that he knew quite a bit about EIC and BCC. Apparently there are quite a few working stock dogs and field trial Labrador Retrievers around here. And at least some of them suffer from it. Apparently, the current estimates are that 30-40%of all Labradors today are carriers.

Anyway, he talked to me about some other things that can present similar symptoms - dilated cardiomyopathy, some heart arrhythmias, glucose/insulin problems, and ... Ehrlichia canis (again with the Ehrlichia). So we mapped out an approach to sort through most of the possibilities pretty quickly and easily for her but probably not so easy on my bank account.

The one thing that is really worrying me about it is that I am going to work her long enough to cause a collapse and monitor a number of things including time, temperature, mental status, etc. I've decided that if I am going to do all of that I might as well set up the video camera and record it. I was planning to do that tomorrow, but have to admit it is sort of freaking me out a little bit. It just seems wrong to go out of my way to cause a collapse even though I know that it will be very helpful to the vets to be able to actually see it. Several of these conditions are known to cause fatalities.

I think I can set it up so that it is relatively safe. Have ice water in a cooler on the field to help cool her off as soon as I get her temp and do a mental status check. But still, it seems awfully risky. Oh man, I hate these sorts of decisions ...