Please say a little prayer for Ike...

So yesterday Ike was frisky and happy when I left the house around 1:30. When I got back at 5:30 he was in the middle of the floor crying, wheelbarrow walked to the garage and collapsed. I got a friend (thanks Kelby) to help me get him in the car and took him to our vet. By the time we got there he was walking (though abnormally) on his right back leg, but his toes were still curled under on the left. After the exam and discussing that he needed to be seen by the neurologist, I decided to take him home rather than make him spend the night in the kennel. He still seemed anxious, but I'd given him some pain meds left over from one of his other ailments, so he didn't seem to be hurting too much anymore. When we got home he tried to jump out of the car and walked into the house on both legs! However, about 30 minutes later he was whining and crying and couldn't get comfortable and wasn't walking on either leg again and really seemed miserable. Andy was home by then so we took him to the emergency vet (Carolina Vet. Specialists - Dr. Smith was great!!) After he examined him, he gave him so valium which really seemed to take the edge off and hooked him up to a Fentanyl (kind of like morphine, but stronger) IV drip - so Ike was feeling quite comfy. He even started walking on his right leg again and could move his left one. It seemed very strange to everyone that his symptoms were coming and going, but he was comfy and the neurologist would see him in the morning unless he got worse again over night. This morning they put him under anesthesia to do a MRI expecting to find a slipped disc or perhaps a tumor or cartilaginous emboli, but instead they found a big clot in his aorta - the big artery the supplies his legs with blood. There's really not much they can do for a dog with this since the surgery to take it out is generally fatal and even if successful wouldn't fix the underlying problem of why the clot formed in the first place (which we don't know and probably never will.) So they were kind enough to give him a fentanyl patch (that will give him the drug through his skin) and some valium to take the edge off and let us take him home...The neurologist was pretty pessimistic about him having much of a recovery, but thought it was reasonable for us to take him home as long as we could keep him comfortable. The Emergency Medicine vet was a bit more hopeful that his body might dissolve the clot. So only time will tell at this point...