Made Sasha garlic butter shrimp for dinner, since she ate the majority of the garlic butter shrimp I made me for lunch.
Not sure that all three of garlic, butter and shrimp are actually essential to her enjoyment of this particular dish, but I don’t like to mess with success.
Things Sasha will not eat under any circumstances:
- Dog food
- Denta-bones
- Canned pumpkin
Things Sasha did eat at one point, but will no longer eat:
- Hot dogs
- Processed cheese
- Rice
- Carrots
- Nachos
- Raw celery
- Dog poop
Things Sasha might eat if they are mixed with things she’d prefer to eat:
- Liverwurst
- Pill pockets
Things Sasha will sometimes eat:
- Chicken
- Chicken Skin
- Ground Beef
- Baby food
- Brie
- Caesar dog treats
- Grilled cheese sandwiches
- Kraft Dinner
Things Sasha will always eat:
- McDonalds cheeseburgers
- Grilled steak
- Dim Sum
- Liver treats
- Rocks
- Landscape Fabric
I like to maintain the self-deception that I am not one of those ‘My dog is my child!’ people who doesn’t recognize the difference between a baby and a puppy.
The fact that I am currently feeding her Heinz strained chicken off a spoon is making that increasingly difficult.
On a related note, Sasha has taken to deliberately curling up next to me on the couch, something she’s never done before. I don’t know if she’s trying to comfort me or her.
Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s me.
Talked to Dr. Martin again just now. The rest of her bloodwork was somewhat vaguely optimistic, by which I mean “pretty bad, but not complete and utter shite” - she is still producing reticulocytes and she’s actually overproducing platelets.
Sasha did eat a little bit of ground beef (funny story about that in a minute) this evening, so that was positive.
We’re going to start her on a new drug, without doing a transfusion, in hopes the new drug will help turn things around a little, and then do a recheck later this week or early next week depending on how her behaviour / demeanour is over the next couple of days.
This delays the really hard question that I don’t want to answer, because I’m willing to keep feeding her pills until she’s either visibly in pain or she gets better.
And now, for your amusement, the beef story, as previously related in IM:
[16:35] Jacquilynne: Ha, so, I’m trying to find something Sash will eat
[16:35] Jacquilynne: She did eat a bit of my cheeseburger on the way home from the vet, so I fried her some ground beef
[16:35] Jacquilynne: But I want her to eat some canned pumpkin, too, since it’s supposed to help with regularity
[16:35] Jacquilynne: So I fed her a piece of beef, and when she ate that, gave her a bowl of beef mixed with pumpkin.
[16:35] Jacquilynne: She kept licking it tentatively, and then looking really annoyed.
[16:35] Jacquilynne: Total bait and switch.
[16:36] Jacquilynne: So I gave her the rest of the plain beef and she ate that.
[16:36] Jacquilynne: And now I’ve given her back the pumpkin bowl
[16:36] Jacquilynne: And she’s trying to figure out how to extract the beef from the pumpkin without eating the pumpkin.
You’d probably need to actually see her trying to gingerly pull pieces of ground beef out of what is basically a pumpkin sauce without having to taste any of that icky pumpkin and then shaking her head in disgust when she inevitably fails to get the full effect of why this is funny. Or possibly even then, it’s only funny relative to the rest of my day which has mostly been spent alternately trying to coax her into the car and bawling my eyes out. But it made me laugh, and I needed that.
More bad news from the vet visit, unfortunately.
Her red blood cells are down to 10%, which is the lowest reading ever. Clearly, the cyclosporin is not working. And it’s got nasty side effects. So, we’re definitely taking her off that, which means she can come off the tylosin, too probably, since she’s only taking it to counteract the side effects.
But what’s next is the big question. The two extreme options are giving her a blood transfusion to boost her levels before we try a different drug on one end and having her put to sleep on the other end. I don’t know what the options in the middle look like — maybe we could start her on the other drug without a transfusion (but maybe that would be just blowing the chances of it working?) or maybe we could just let everything go but the prednisone and just do some palliative care for her as long as she survives. I don’t know if either of those are really options, I’d have to discuss them with Dr. Martin.
I’m so conflicted about this, I can’t separate out the decisions that are right for her from the decisions that are easiest for me, and I feel so guilty at the thought of doing the wrong thing for selfish reasons, that I’m then terrified I’ll do some other wrong thing in order to avoid the guilt. It’s paralyzing.
Woke up this morning to find that Sasha had peed and vomited and vomited some more (or possibly the latter was poop, but if so, it wasn’t much poop) in her pen over night and was cowering in her crate. Took her out for a walk, and then brought her back in and she won’t eat anything, not even a liver treat, which is usually the one thing she will eat no matter what. Which is concerning on its own, and also because it makes it rather impossible to give her any pills.
Fortunately (unfortunately? fortunately because it helps in this instance, unfortunately due to the broader medical implications?) she already has a vet appointment this morning, so I don’t need to wonder whether to make her one.
I avoided buy Sasha squeaky toys because I assumed they would Fran her out. Because everything freaks her out. But we were just in the lobby, having a sit, and somebody’s baby started honking on one of these ubiquitous giraffes. Sasha immediately got up and ran (well, ran relative to her usual pace - so, trotted briskly) across the lobby to investigate.
Apparently a squeaky toy should be procured immediately!
I’m worried about Sasha this morning. She’s really not eating — she ate two Caesar treats, and enough Brie to get the important pills into her, but she won’t eat chicken skin or actual chicken or liver treats.
Dr. Martin, her doc at the VEC is away this week, so hopefully her appetite will improve. Taking her to her regular vet seems like it’s probably fairly pointless given that they aren’t actually treating her myelofibrosis, nor did they prescribe the drugs that are likely to be causing the lack of appetite. But if Dr. Martin’s not in, maybe taking her to the VEC to see someone else is an even bigger waste of time and money?
Sasha’s new haircut means she gets a little cold under the AC.