Sorry this is off topic but I just got the devastating diagnosis last week that Hallie is suffering from a congenital dilated spinal cord. For the last 3 years she was going through fairly mild bouts of what I figured to be the typical doxie disc pain but the episodes have been getting more frequent and she had a really bad one 2 weeks ago, we ran to the neurologist figuring she'd need surgery but turned out she has this other evil thing.

I am totally beside myself, as you know Hallie is all I have and we are inseperable, I could never make it without her. I am trying to find more info about this, I scared myself to death googling and found syrinomyelia but the neurologist said that was a "different ballgame". I don't know how he can know as we had not done an MRI just an xray, CT scan and myelogram which only went to L2. She has had no neck pain or neurological deficits. The vet said there is not a name for this but again I don't know how he knows for sure.

I am just writing in case someone has happened to see this rare thing and has any insight or hopefully words of encouragement as this does not sound good and is not curable. She is now off steroids for the first time in 2 weeks, she has not been herself at all but she's defintely more comfortable than she was the first couople of days. We had been to a dog match 2 days before this hit and she was so happy and having a ball. She got a high score in Rally and got 4th in open bitch (my little pound puppy). Now I don't know if I'll ever see her like that again if we can ever go on another walk, etc. I've taken her to where we walk twice and where she would normally take off running with me going as fast as I can to keep up with her, she just stood or walked slow. My heart is broken and I'm really scared, we're going to another neurologist this Thursday just to see if we can get some more answers, I just hope they aren't answers I dont want to hear. An MRI would show what is going on in there all the way up but it won't change her treatment or outcome, it would just satisfy our curiosity to what things look like in there so I don't want to put her through that, she had a very rough time at the neurologist last week.

Any chance anyone has heard of this, if the vet is right and it's not syringomyelia (which is fairly rare itself except in Cavaliers where the majority have it, some just never show symptoms but it's a horrible problem in the breed)then I don't know what else it could be and if it would even mean anything different for a prognosis.