It is mercilessly efficient whether it is covering your butt or kicking it. It moves at the same speed when it is confused. Your immune system moves fast – think of how fast you go from the depths of the flu to feeling fine one or two days and you are back to normal, once it gets a toe-hold on the invading bugs. The speed always amazes clients, and makes it one of those diseases that prompts people to use the old ‘but, doc he was fine yesterday’ line. It can happen with remarkable speed – one day your dog is happily snoozing by the fire, the next day your veterinarian is telling you that he’s in a 50:50 battle for his life. Jaundice (yellow discoloration) of the whites of the eyes.Incidentally, onions, mothballs and the zinc found in pennies minted after 1982 can all cause the same thing. The ‘hemolytic’ in the name refers to the process of popping or lysing red blood cells.
In most cases, the trigger is never known – one day, your immune system wakes up and says “yesterday – viruses and bacteria, today – red blood cells! Tomorrow – who knows?!” and starts destroying them with abandon.
One of the more common autoimmune diseases that veterinarians see is IMHA, in which the immune system decides that red blood cells would make a tasty snack and goes after them like Chuck Norris after the bad guys. I think it’s because the pancreas said something about the immune system’s mama once, and it all went downhill from there. Even diabetes (Type I, in which the body stops making insulin) is an autoimmune disease at its core the body attacks the cells of the pancreas that make insulin. These are the so-called autoimmune diseases, many of which you have heard of: rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Grave’s disease. In other cases, your immune system gets even more confused and decides that little bits of you – important bits of you, like joints and blood – are the bad guy and takes them out. To my knowledge, pollen has never killed anyone – so, why the big fuss, immune system? Your immune system decides that pollen, for example, is dreadful and must be eliminated at all costs and mounts an attack that leaves you with puffy eyes, a runny nose and a bad case of the sneezies. In some cases, it gets confused and decides that something totally harmless is worthy of note and launches a counteroffensive – this is what happens with most allergies. It doesn’t always work the way it is supposed to. Your immune system is an amazingly choreographed and intricate machine with dozens of types of cells and hundreds of chemical messengers that allow it to determine what’s you, what’s not you, and what’s potentially trying to kill you. Your immune system stands a post, grabs a gun and keeps all these hazards at bay so you can spend another day looking for just the right pair of jeggings at the Gap. Every minute of every day, viruses are trying to enter your sinuses, bacteria want to creep into your blood stream, and even your own cells decide what the heck – let’s mutate and try and cause cancer. Your immune system keeps you safe and protected from all the zillions of things that try to kill you every day. This disease is immune-mediated hemolytic anemia, or IMHA, and I will give you a little insight into its nefarious workings right now.
But there is one disease that almost always sends heads spinning and puts a look of blank incomprehension on the faces of pet owners. Most of the diseases that we see and treat in the ER can be pretty easily comprehended by non-medical folks: trauma, infection, cancer – all of these seem to make sense to pet owners when we discuss them.
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