Poopeh

Last week was rough as hell. Stressful. And fucking expensive.

Eliot’s bowel went to Code Poo on the Saturday morning, a vet visit resulted in an expensive blood test, and treatment for worms.

Monday was a planned visit, where he had a steroid injection. I just thought he’d be fine with it like Bertie was. Nope. He leaked out of every part of him overnight, sick, poop and pee. Poor little dude.

Tuesday he slept WAY too much so I took him back and he had an antiemetic which made him feel better.

I had to switch him to a bland diet because his kibble had just been escalating in a war of unwellness.

It’s now 12 days later, and we’ve had four days of solid poops. He’s eating all his meals (and bloody excited to do so). He’s not refusing to go on walks. He’s not scavenging for anything to eat on walks. And the vet has finally agreed that changing his food is a good idea.

Traumatised

Overlooking the asshat on LinkedIn who said I was trivialising saying I had PTSD. Or not, because he REALLY got it full barrels last Monday. I am and was traumatised. The last urgent Saturday morning vet visit I had to do, I didn’t come home with my dog. And I still remember Bertie’s first year of life which was just a sea of poop, quite literally, and a bratty, badly behaved dog who didn’t want to walk, couldn’t be trained and was a general nightmare… not least because he must have been in so much pain.

So there is fuck all chance I’m putting Eliot through that. And to be brutally honest, his first two months here have been miserable. He’s been badly behaved (beyond what a puppy should be like), he hasn’t been sleeping during the day, he can’t self-regulate, he peed everywhere, he refused walks, he was bitey and barky. It’s been horrible for both of us.

A puppy that can’t regulate sleep during the day is like a child who’s consumed a shit ton of sunset yellow. And they must feel terrible.

One problem, or two?

The advantage of being autistic and a taxonomist is that I’m super observant and see patterns in things.
The disadvantage of this is that it makes me slightly neurotic and worried that I’m not being taken seriously.

I ended up sending a mammoth email to my vets, largely because I got stuck in really bad loop of “is this normal, or not?”

My vets are amazing, they really are, but I think I’m at the point where they think I’m neurotic and don’t trust them. Which I absolutely do. It’s also that Bertie’s first year was miserable for everyone, and I don’t want to put Eliot through that so I’m not being complacent or putting up with stuff.

The thing I was most concerned about is that yes, there is a good chance he had worms. But also he’d been refusing to eat his breakfast and lunch. So he’d go out on walks and scavenge because he was fucking starving. The only meal he would eat was dinner, and that was only because it had FortiFlora on it.

The first test had come back negative for worms and parasites. That doesn’t mean he didn’t have them when he had Code Poo on the Saturday, but I just didn’t know if the scavenging caused the worms or if the worms caused the scavenging.

Honestly, his refusal to eat his kibble was escalating, and I don’t want to go back to having to try to walk a dog first thing in the morning who’s hangry and pissed off with me. It’s not fun for him, and it’s not fun for me.

So getting them to agree that changing the dog food was a good idea. I haven’t got the food yet, so the jury is out on whether it will work or not. And when I’ve got a better idea of what’s going on with it, I’ll give a better update.

Trust your gut

I know, ironic, but having a dog that’s eating a bland diet, who’s pooping properly, who’s not a giant bag of dicks to be around and who is actually self-regulating himself to sleep for extended periods throughout the day right now, is a DREAM.

My gut is telling me Eliot may well have the same condition as Bertie did, but as they won’t diagnose him until he’s a year old, and there’s not actually a test TO confirm it, a diet that he can eat in the short term is better than the hell of him being in pain.

So, right now, I’m enjoying a happy, snoozy and cuddly puppy.