Tools

Everything on this page exists because the same problem keeps coming up in owner communities: the cardiologist gives you an instruction — count his breathing, watch his appetite, tell me if anything changes — and nobody gives you anywhere to put the answers. Six weeks later you are trying to reconstruct a month of observations in an exam room from memory, and memory is not up to it.

These are four small things that turn scattered worry into a record. They are free, they require no account, and they save data in your own browser rather than on our servers. Each one exports a plain text log you can email to your practice or hand over at an appointment.

None of them diagnose anything. They record what you observe and chart it over time, which is a genuinely useful thing to walk into a consultation holding — and, as owners repeatedly describe it, a way of giving the anxiety a job.

• Resting respiratory rate tracker — start here, whatever stage your dog is at. Counting sleeping breaths takes thirty seconds and is the earliest home signal that fluid is collecting in the lungs, typically rising days before a cough appears. Most healthy dogs sit between 15 and 30 breaths a minute; a sustained rate above 35 to 40 in a diagnosed dog is the point most cardiologists want a phone call, and above 60 is treated as an emergency. Your own vet sets your dog's number — ask for it.
• Medication tracker — for the households running three or four drugs at two or three times a day, half with food rules attached. It records what was actually given rather than what was scheduled, which is the version your vet needs when the question is whether something changed before or after a dose adjustment.
• Quality of life tracker — seven domains, scored 0 to 10 for a total out of 70, ideally weekly on the same day. It exists to catch the slow slide that daily proximity hides, and to make a fuzzy question answerable: not whether today is the day, but whether this month is better or worse than the last.
• Supplement assessment — sorts the supplement shelf by how good the evidence actually is for your dog's condition and current medications, and flags the interactions worth raising. Bring the output to your veterinarian as a question list rather than starting anything on your own.

The three trackers are more useful side by side than individually. A rising breathing rate that lines up with the week a diuretic dose changed tells a story neither record tells alone. A quality of life score that dropped in the same fortnight the appetite notes went quiet is a different conversation from either observation on its own.

A workable weekly rhythm

Plenty of households run better on a sheet stuck to the fridge than on an app, particularly when more than one person is giving medication. The Heart Dog Tracker Pack is a free set of printable sheets covering the same ground: a breathing rate log with a baseline box at the top, a medication schedule, a symptom checklist, a weekly quality of life scale, and an emergency card to photograph and keep in the car. Designed to stay legible printed in black and white, in US Letter and A4.