Thursday, February 26, 2009

Jasper the Pill-Popper

Poor Jasper's cut is healing beautifully, and he is barely limping any more.

Unfortunately, the vomiting I wrote about over the weekend turned into a few days of very little eating at all. He seems to have some stomach irritation, probably from the combination of the antibiotic and the painkiller. (This happens to people, too.)

I called the vet yesterday, and they advised waiting one more day to see if the eating picked up since he'd just finished his antibiotic course. He ate a cup of his kibble last night, and I thought we were out of the woods, but he went back to not eating today. Off we headed into the vet again this afternoon.

They were once again very kind to our shy boy, and Jasper was actually very brave! He got on the scale and on the examining table all by himself, without needing to be picked up.

And now we're home with new marching orders: no kibble for the next couple of days, just very small meals ("the size of a meatball") of 4 parts rice to 1 part cottage cheese, with probiotic powder mixed in. He can have a bunch of those spread out through the day as long as he's tolerating them.

Three times a day, he gets a syringe of carafate/water mixture squirted down his throat. That coats his stomach lining to provide some relief, and has to be given at least an hour before any other medicine.

Then twice a day he gets a Pepcid pill to decrease stomach acid.

So far this evening, he's had a squirt of carafate, then three of his mini-meals each an hour apart, one of them with the Pepcid mixed in. Everything is staying down at this point, and he turns out to love rice and cottage cheese. Who knew?

1 comment:

Clara said...

You should swap Jasper off of kibble altogether. Put him on a raw diet. Our dogs are on a raw diet, and we go through www.sfraw.com to order their food. We have a freezer out in the garage to hold all the meat that Balou and Trillian eat in a month. It's a lot, since Balou is 120lb and still filling out.

But I remember you saying something about wanting to have a vegetarian dog? I don't know anything about that since we feed the dogs mostly meat and bones and some veggies. But I'd think it would be possible as long as you didn't try to sub grains for the meat.