Feeling a bit off colour

Jazz has been "not quite right" recently. He's not been very interested in food (but then he's always more interested in stuff going on than his dinner, especially if we're not at home, which we often weren't over the holiday period), and not chasing the ball as enthusiastically as usual in the park.

There have been a few other things too, which I would have discounted if they weren't all together: sometimes his gums have bled if he had a rawhide chew, for instance. His breath has been smelly. He's also been huddling strangely in his crate in the car when we were traveling, which isn't like him.

So today, I took him to see Fiona the vet. She examined him and said that his lymph nodes were enlarged. There was no obvious sign of dental problems. She took a blood test and sent me home with some antibiotics for him.

The blood test showed that all his major organs are working well for a dog of his age, but his white cell count is low. This could indicate that the enlarged lymph nodes are a sign of lymphoma, or that he has been fighting off some infection or other and is struggling to produce enough white cells to do it. We'll see how the antibiotics go, and take him back next week. If there's no change, she'll keep him in to take a biopsy of the lymph gland.