Gosh…..just when you think things are going great it all comes crashing down.  Onyx took a turn for the worse this past weekend.  What triggers these episodes we just can’t figure out.  Back to explosive diarrhea.  She ended up at NP vet for the day on Monday hooked up to IV fluids (and this was after we gave her 3 days of SubQ fluids here at home).  She vomited twice over the weekend…once a huge amount of water she had just drank and then later that night all her canned food.  She also had a huge bloodly blowout and that too is something new.

So after our vet consulted with several internests we have once again changed her food.  She is on Purina HA.  Never, ever if I looked at the ingredients before Onyx would I have  put a dog on this food.  First ingredient is “starch” and then hydrolyzed soy protein……reading on down the list there is NO meat….NO animal products at all!  yikes!  But we are at our wits end with our girl so we are trying this out.  She is also on an antibiotic and back to Tylan (since metronitidzole seemed to be doing nothing).

She seems stable today and readily eats the food.  (It looks like white marbles and has no smell at all…)  Her one stool today was water but I didn’t see any sort of food stuff in it at all!  A few tiny chunks of something….almost colorless.

So we will keep her on this for a few days.  The vet wants to add another drug to her budesonide but it is a chemotherapy drug that we have to get at the hospital and we have to wear gloves so we don’t touch it!  yikes again!

What a terrible disease….

Good news.  Her newest blood panel showed all of her values in the normal range!  (except for platelets and those are signs of inflammation).  Her neutrophils are back up to the normal range and her panel looks amazingly “boring” and that says something about this dog!

She is off the antibiotics but before that her stools started to get very soft and a lot more diarrhea.  Probably the antibiotics screwing up whatever good flora she does have in her gut.  So she is on probiotics and her canned dog food. 

One thing I have become very aware of though.  Once her stools start to get soft she is very inclined to get dehydrated which makes things even worse.  A couple of nights ago I put 500 ml of fluids (sub-Q) into her and within 24 hours her stools were looking good again.  So I just have to be very aware that once she starts going in the direction of very soft stools, it is time to add more fluids to her body.

When I had her to the vet for bloodwork her weight was up to 35.2 pounds!  So very slowly she is adding some weight.  I really can’t wait to see her above 40 pounds.