Vocal Voices

Two things to ask you - most importantly, how is Minnie getting on? I am assuming that no news is good news.

Millie is doing well - she hasn't been sick for ages and when I weighed her yesterday she was just under 14kilos.

Second thing to ask - what are the symptoms of colitis. I am beginning to wonder if Millie has it (she had it as a pup but that seemed so long ago I don't remember much about it and it cleared up really quickly after visiting the vets).

She keeps getting bouts of diarrhea. She can be fine for a week or two and then her poo will start to get slightly sloppy until it becomes really runny. Then it becomes diarrhea (wanting to go out quite regularly to poo, and crying to go out two or three times at night which normally is unheard of, gurgly noises coming from her tummy and trumping noises as she poos). After a day or so she is fine - the poo becomes less sloppy and then she is back to normal.

On Tuesday the sloppy poo started (still pick-up-able though), Wednesday it was washing down rather than picking up and then last night I was up and down letting her out. This morning she has had one sloppy poo and one pick-up-able one. Oh and when it is very sloppy it has a sort of mucus (sp) in it and is quite dark.

In herself she is fine - still really energetic, eating normally and seems to be in no pain at all.

I need to pop her up to the vets really and have a chat with them but I can't get until next week now.

Its quite frustrating really as it seems to have stopped coming out of one end and is now coming out of the other!!!! It doesn't seem to be affecting her weight though - she is gaining well, slowly but surely.

Oh Lord, it's a nightmare isn't it. I would have said yes, Minnie's getting much much better, but Bb came back with her this morning and said she's got the liquid runs again...She's only had rice and chicken, with a few handfuls of dogfood.
I just this morning cooked some lambs liver but no idea what to do again now - back to plain rice I suppose, but she'd already had a little bit of scrambled egg and dogfood.

The mucous and gurgling stomach would pretty definitely be colitis; does it ever go orange? I'm not sure it always does, Minnie's didn't the first time but then it was ulcerated so was bloody and jelly-like (yuk yuk yuk I know).

I guess I'd better freeze the liver, and cook some more rice
We've also been trying the steroid just every other day and were hoping that would stop it, I now have no idea whether they're making it better or worse

Back to the colitis, the usual advice is to starve them for a day, then plain rice, then add chicken. Even with Millie's weight problem, I wouldn't feed her again today, with colitis it does make it worse. Then try her with rice tomorrow morning, a tablespoon at a time, every hour if you can (process it if you need to, for the texture).
If you google dog colitis there's quite a bit but it does all give more or less the same advice.

Sorry Debih, this was about Millie and now I've taken over with Minnie again

But anyway, we've talked it through and realised that each time it's happened, has been soon after we've re-introduced the actual dogfood. The hypo-allergenic, no dog will ever have a reaction to, dogfood...

So when Bb goes out he's going to the pet shop in town, to have a chat with them about what else to try, or whether we should just cook everything for her. I'm not prepared to do it completely myself, I'm thinking chicken or liver, rice, carrots then a supplement to cover everything else. But I'd really rather be able to just give her dogfood, at least some of the time. Apart from anything else we just don't have much space in either the fridge or the freezer.

Hope Millie's ok once all she's eaten has gone through
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