Sorry for not posting!  It's been a bit crazy, and I just haven't had much time.  I really appreciate you all asking about me. 

 

Also, I kind of feel like I've run out of things to talk about.  But I'll come up with something.  In fact, I had a classic case of Addison's Disease not too long ago, so I'll describe that in my next post.  It's a 'classic emergency'.

 

Thank you all for asking about me.  We are all fine.  Mitch and Mike (the new kittens) are getting big and are pretty crazy.  And VERY cute.

 

My own dog Daisy had a bit of a health scare.  She started getting some blood in her stool, but otherwise seemed to feel ok.  So we checked some bloodwork on her - her liver values were elevated.  We put her on some meds for that, and Hilary (our internal medicine specialist) did a colonoscopy (ouch!). 

 

Her biopsies came back 'inflammatory bowel disease' - or chronic inflammation in her colon (we see this with some frequency in animals).  So she went on some medications and a special diet.  So far so good - nothing real bad, no cancer, etc.

 

Only about a week later, she started getting a small prolapse of tissue from her anus.  (Ouch again!)  Every time she had a bowel movement, the tissue came out.  She also still had the persistent blood in her stool (just small amounts).  It turns out this thing had developed into a polyp (that was not there when we scoped her).  And the polyp kept poking out everytime she had a BM. 

 

So we rechecked her liver values before we put her under anesthesia again to take the polyp out - they had gone up a lot despite the meds.  And I started getting really worried, and we delayed taking the polyp out.  So this time we got a biopsy of her liver.  It didn't show anything significant - just some inflammation.  More meds.  For 4 weeks.

 

I found that I could just push the polyp back in when she pooped.  Poor Daisy - she got to the point that when I said "Show me your butt" she just plopped on her side with a very resigned look in her eyes.

 

And a couple weeks ago her liver values were better, and we got the dang polyp out!

 

(But she'll still plop on her side every time I say 'show me your butt.')

 

And to add to the embarrassment for her, her rear end is shaved, so now I call her 'Baboon-Butt'.

 

Poor Daisy.