My 3 year old has quite a bad tracheal collapse, and, as many of the stories above, he has a hard time during hot days.
Over the summer, he is on hycodan (codeine cough syrup), Vanectyl P (antihistamine/corticosteriod) and benadryl (bad allergies which have made the TC worse). We've weaned him off the Vanectyl P as he was gaining weight that we couldn't control with exercise due to having two bad luxating patellas. Lucky us. Instead of the Vanectyl P, we've moved to an inhaled steroid (Ventolin and Flovent) through a puffer twice a day. It's hard to say if he's doing well due to the change, or due to the change in temperature (fall is a lovely time for him!). Nonetheless, I am so far happy with how he's been. When he starts honking, which he still does, we'll remove him from whatever is exciting him (so many things!), and we find if we carry him, he'll stop almost immediately. We haven't had to give him the hycodan in probably a month, so that is uplifting!
As for surgery. We've had a consult with an orthopedic surgeon, which was enlightening to say the least. While he is a prime candidate for a stent, the vet was strongly against stenting him, as she has never had a dog last more than a year. Her reasoning is actually quite sound, and it was rather eye opening to me. You have an irritated trachea, and you open it up with a foreign object. While you can now breathe, the already irritated trachea is now being constantly irritated by this permanently lodged foreign object that their body is trying to reject/remove from your system...and it can't. Surgery, for us, will be off the table forever as it currently stands.
I'm sorry to hear that you're going through this.
