Zoey is a 10 month old Brindle Pit Bull that I adopted less than 2 weeks ago from the Humane Society of Riverside. A couple of days after bringing her home, we suspected she was running a fever.

The next day she had mucus coming out of her nose and crust in her eyes. We really became alarm, as we have several other dogs at home. The good thing we were keeping her isolated as she had been spayed at the pound before we brought her home. We took her to our vet and he diagnosis her with distemper. He told us we may want to consider returning her to the pound as distemper is very fatal, only a 50% chance of survival. We said no way. She could live out the rest of her life with us no matter how long. Our vet sent out a sample of her poop to an outside lab just to be sure. He put her on several medications and when the test came back positive for distemper he put her on another one.

We took Zoey to the vet this past Friday, he was surprised, but pleased she was doing much better, she even gained 4 pounds. I am still worry that she may not recover as the stories I’ve read on the internet say it is an incurable disease, and if a dog does survive, it may still have lingering affects from the distemper We hope it was caught it early, though we still worry about our other dogs catching it. But as long as we keep everything clean and disinfected we should be OK.

We thought Zoey was a quiet and shy dog at the time we adopted her, but now that she is feeling better she is silly and very energetic, and we adore her.