The Seattle Times: Snohomish County News: Costly care, valued animals

A calendar photo of a dachshund seems to express sympathy for Casey, a pug being placed on the MRI table by veterinary technician Janine Clymin at the Veterinary Specialty Center in Lynnwood.

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For $1,250, Ernest Bayer could have jetted to Hawaii with a friend for five days. Heck, he could have taken his true best friend — his pug, Casey — along for the ride.

But the Wenatchee man is worried about Casey, whom he adopted as a puppy from an Iowa pet store about eight years ago. The sociable pug has a stiff neck and trouble with stairs. He still chases birds off backyard grapevines and power lines, but he's just not his old self.

So last week, Bayer made a three-hour drive to Lynnwood's Veterinary Specialty Center, one of only three places in the state with an MRI system dedicated to diagnosing ailments in pets. The other two are in Tacoma and at Washington State University's veterinary school.

"It wasn't an easy decision. You have to kind of argue with yourself if you want to spend that kind of money on an animal," said Bayer, a retired social worker. "A lot of people don't value animals at all — if it's going to inconvenience them, they'll put them to sleep or drop them off in the country."

MRI technology, or magnetic resonance imaging, was developed in the late 1970s and became commercially available for human diagnoses in 1983, said Joe Helpern, a New York University radiology professor who co-developed the first MRI designed for pets. His $850,000 system is installed in three East Coast animal hospitals.

Using MRIs for pets is a natural step, he said, as the public becomes more educated about the technology, which uses powerful magnets directed at specific parts of the body to generate computer images that look a bit like X-rays. He estimated that only 30 to 40 veterinary programs around the nation are using conventional MRI systems — the kind made for people — to scan animals.

ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Casey is prepped for the procedure.

Lynnwood's MRI specialist, pet neurologist Sean Sanders, recently earned a doctorate at WSU. When the local medical center offered him a job, he said he needed an MRI system to do it right. So now he has one, purchased secondhand from Georgia in early 2003.

Now he performs 30 to 40 MRIs a month on animals brought from as far away as Alaska.

On Thursday, Sanders had a lengthy list of patients scheduled for MRIs, starting with Scruffy, a 10-year-old terrier mix. The Arlington dog clearly had serious back problems, with a tendency to fall and difficulty standing up.

Dogs with short legs and long bodies are susceptible to bulging or slipped disks, Sanders said, but the problem also could be cancer or an infection of the bones. The MRI would pinpoint the ailment.

Technicians gently prepared Scruffy for his medical test, inserting a catheter for an IV tube into his right front paw and then slipping a tube into his throat, to deliver a mix of oxygen and anesthetics to his lungs.

Then a device to measure his vital signs was clipped to his tongue, and his heart rate and blood-oxygenation data popped up on a small monitor.

Soon it was time to carry Scruffy through a side door to the MRI trailer parked outside the medical center, shielded from public view by paneling that matches the building.

He was carefully placed on his back atop a hot-water blanket, with vinyl-covered sandbags lined up on each side to keep him still. A fleece blanket topped him, to keep him cozy in his sleep. Then he was slipped inside the Philips Gyroscan T5, a door sealing off that half of the trailer closed, and the testing began.

When the first images showed up on the computer monitors, the source of Scruffy's back pain and stiffness became obvious. Virtually every disk along Scruffy's spine was bulging or blown. Sanders tapped his fingers on the images, which looked solid black, and compared them with a healthier dog's MRI on an adjacent computer monitor.

An MRI's magnet is a superconductor, spinning in a bath of liquid helium at 4 degrees above absolute zero. Sanders explained that humans — and dogs — are composed mostly of water, which in turn contains hydrogen. The magnet makes the hydrogen atoms' electrons spin in a specific direction, and then a pulse of energy disrupts the magnetic field and they fall out of sync.

The MRI scanner detects the energy given off when the electrons' orbits change, he said, and assembles the data to create an image of the body's tissues.

Once the MRI tells its story, the punch line can vary dramatically.

As technicians began to prepare Pookie, a large black cat with neck trouble, Sanders called Scruffy's owner. He gently but matter-of-factly explained his findings, stressing that disk surgery — which would cost an additional $2,500 to $3,000 — might not relieve the dog's back pain.

"This is not a case where I can say, 'Boom, this is the problem, and if I fix it, everything will be better,' " he said.

By day's end, Sanders said, the owner decided to have Scruffy euthanized.

Casey's owner got similar bad news — with an identical price tag — the same afternoon. With five bad disks in his neck, surgery might not help the pug. Bayer decided to take his dog home and try nonsurgical treatments.

Sanders said he hears a lot of people scoff at the notion of spending $5,000 on a dog's brain surgery.

"Well, how can anyone spend $50,000 on a Hummer? It's all perceived value," Sanders said. "For a family member, people would spend all the money in the world, if they had it."

Diane Brooks: 425-745-7802 or dbrooks@seattletimes.com

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