Feeding Bel

Bel is sick.  She may be ill because of liver damage from her meds, as I suspect, or  she may simply  not  feel well from all of them–I won’t know until I get a full liver panel done next week.  But in any case, the little girl does not feel well, and has not eaten a full meal since Thursday.

Our little sick girl

I was quite worried about her on Saturday and Sunday, but since then, she seems slightly better.  Until today, she was not willing to eat anything on her own; I had to syringe liquid into her mouth.   However, she’s since taken a bit of her puree by spoon, and we just had a victory!  She ate something out of a dish on her own:  1/4 cup of vanilla ice cream!  No, that’s not a normal part of her diet, but at this point, I’m more interested in getting something in her to keep her blood sugar up.

She has managed to keep everything down, so far,  though she did vomit up some water earlier today.  She’s not out of the woods yet.  But the fact that she takes anything is a plus.

When I had to force feed Toby, I hadn’t thought of the idea of pureeing the food and then squirting it down his throat with a syringe.  I had to stuff food in his mouth, then hold his mouth shut until he swallowed.  It was a VERY slow process, and so far, Bel is unwilling to chew anything.   She utterly refused her fish and potato mush (which is very much coveted by the other dogs):

No! I don't want it!

So I made a puree.  I took the fish mush and mixed it with goat’s milk, chicken broth, and a little Ensure to add to the calorie count.   Sometimes I give it to her just like that, squirted into her mouth.

Last night, after syringing the liquid into her mouth every two hours, I noticed that she was starting to lick at the syringe, which suggested to me she might be ready to progress to the next step.  So I made her puree a bit thicker by adding some chicken and rice flavored baby food.  At first, she was unimpressed:

I'm not eating!

But I’d heated it a bit too, hoping the smell might get her interested, so eventually she had to take a sniff:

Hmm...what is that?

And then finally, she decided to take just a little taste:

 

It's not bad!

And then, a little more:

 

She likes it!

Success!

Leave it to a Shiba to refuse to eat unless it’s off a spoon!

Feeding Bel is a pretty time-consuming, though.   She won’t eat much at once, which is ok, because I’ve read that small meals are better anyway for dogs who have overtaxed livers.   The most I manage to feed her at one time is about a 1/4 cup of anything, whether it is the puree, the puree/baby food mix, or ice cream.   That’s not very much, and I’ve really only gotten up to the 1/4 cup at a time yesterday and today.  To put this in perspective, we still haven’t worked through an entire bottle of Ensure, and each bottle has 250 calories.   Since I mix it with other things, I’d guess she’s managed to get maybe 300 calories today, so far, maybe closer to 400 now that she just had her ice cream.   It’s not enough.

But it’s better than Saturday, when I could barely get her to take anything at all.  And she’s drinking on her own, so she’s not at risk of becoming dehydrated.

Toby, who has clearly entirely forgotten his own experience with liver disease and forced feeding, is a bit demoralized by all the attention Bel is getting, but because she’s sick, they’ve been able to be together in the house:

Toby dreams of fish mush

You may have noticed that in the feeding pictures she doesn’t have her “cone” on.   I take it off when I feed her, even though it does kind of function like a giant plastic bib–all the things she pushes out of her mouth end up in the cone for easy clean up!  I can’t leave it off very long, though, because she immediately starts licking at her incision site if I do.   The wound itself looks good–it’s clean and healing well,  and her fur is growing back:

Unfortunately, she keeps licking at a spot that the splint rubbed on, and she’s polished it down in to bare skin.  This is why I have to keep the cone on.  I also put a bit of calendula cream on that spot and on the incision a couple of times a day to help speed the healing along.

The dark spot is where she licks

Poor Bel!  Between being shaved and being sick and not eating, she’s looking positively thin:

Little Miss Wasp Waist

But she is doing better today, and I’ll keep feeding her every few hours and dosing her with milk thistle and B vitamins, and I expect she’ll continue to make progress.   And next week, she’ll be back to the vet for a full liver panel.

And there is some good news:  she’s walking on her leg quite normally these days, and is even able to get into her “froggy” pose, where she stretches her back legs out behind her when she’s laying down.  So the surgery, at least, seems to have been a success.