Josie_luv
Dec 28, 2007, 09:25 AM
My 3-4 year old black lab has been diagnosed with megaesophagus. Her eshophagus is about 600x the normal size for dogs. The vet said that the disease is either a birth defect or it just happened because she ate something too big. We have ruled out a birth defect, because she has got sick about a month ago. If she did not wake me up in the night, she would throw up and have bowel movements in the house. It was border line diarrhea, and in multiple spots. The frequency got so bad that I had to make her sleep outside. This broke my heart cause she usually slept in my room. When I moved to beach side, she got so much worse. She wasn't having any bowel movements, and she was having a hard time of urinating. We took her to the vet. The vet gave us some bacteria to give her to get her to digest her food. If anything, it made her throw up more. She started to urinate again. And a lot of it. But when she would try to have bowel movements, she would strain her self to go. Most times she would just give up. The throwing up became more frequent. It was now happening every time she ate. I thought it was because she was eating it too fast. So we went to a different vet. The vet gave us a medicated food. I began to spoon feed her, so that I could control how fast she ate. But I believe that she made a connection that food in general was making her throw up. She stopped eating. She turned her nose up at it. She lost about 10 pounds in one week. We took her back to the vet and he took an x-ray and blood work. He diagnosed her with megashopogous and also with e-coli. The vet said that most dogs get e-coli from drinking water that was sitting on the ground. Josie has a habbit of doing that. So the vet gave us a human medicine that would contract her muscles as well as a medicine for the e-coli. Because her ashopogous is so large, the muscle was stretched to a point where it is bearly there, it doesn't work. The vet also told us to feed her, and give her medicine vertically. The gravity would take the food straight through her ashophgous and into her stomach. If it doesn't go straight through, she will drown if she doesn't regurgitate it. We tried different ways of doing it. We are now sitting her backwards in a recliner with her paws on the top of the chair. She doesn't like food now so we have to force feed her. We don't like doing this. If we don't get the food far enough in her mouth, she will spit it out. She is a very docile dog, she would let us open her mouth, but now, she clamps her mouth shut. I don't want to hurt her. But her attitude is that of a person who is anorexic. She won't eat cream cheese, peanut butter or bannanas. They were her favorite treats. Last night we tried an oyster. She licked my hands (its a good sign), but the oyster didn't go down, so she regurigtated it. If she eats, and the food goes straight to her stomach, she won't regurgitate. We can get her to not regurigtate, that part is easy. The hard part is getting her to like food. I know that there are werid combinations that dogs like. And the most basic one is often the right one. But I am already too exhausted to think. I don't want my baby to starve to death. She looks like a super model (the really super skinny ones)! You can see the end of her rib cage and her face looks really thin. She is improving with recognition and coming to me when I call her. She became catatonic at one point but now she is pulling out of it. It is good. But the main problem now it finding her appitite. She used to be a big pig, she liked a lot of food types. But we can't find a trigger. I am about to go crazy.