[Gpdd] [Health] Help! Puffy is starving

scalabro3 at cfl.rr.com scalabro3 at cfl.rr.com
Thu Jun 6 16:26:31 EDT 2013


Greetings!  This has been a rough year. I’d love to tell you about everything, but right now, I need your help. Puffy, our four year old abby boar, stopped being able to eat carrots three weeks ago.  We brought him into the vet and she trimmed his teeth, but when we got him home, he couldn’t eat anything. After a week of critical care and baby food, he developed the “slobbers,” and she treated him with sulfatrim, bactrim and metacam. One week later, he developed terrible diarrhea and the vet diagnosed him with dysbiosis. She said that he had just about a total GI shutdown. We transplanted pellets from his partner Cocoa Puff and our Alpha male, Chakalaka, and he seemed to be improving. She stopped all meds except for metronidazole (flagyl) and supplemental vitamin C and had me change his diet to critical care and green veggies (no carrots or anything starchy or sugary). His weight started to go up until I had to go back to work after a three-day weekend.  His weight was dipping a bit, but overall, he still seemed to be improving.  He was making something very close to normal pellets by June 4th, and then we dropped him off at the vet for a check up. The vet was pleased with his progress. The next morning, when I picked him up to feed him, he had a lot of dried feces on his bottom. I brought him to the bathroom to wash it off, and when I did, more diarrhea started pouring out of him.  It wasn’t the awful smelly baby-food/carrot mix he had before, but it was like watered down critical care.

We’ve been feeding him critical care and trying to encourage him to eat pellets or hay with almost no success. He will eat some lettuce.  About an hour ago, I was encouraged that he ate two oxbow pellets that I had softened with water, but then he started choking and hacking. Since then, he seems very uncomfortable. The vet is checking with a specialist and said that she would call me when she had any more suggestions about things to try.  We just don’t know what to do. He’s lost a pound over the last few weeks, and he was only 2.5 pounds to start.  She has done blood tests, fecal test, x-rays, ultrasounds, and nothing has shown up that could explain this.  If anyone has any suggestion, please email me directly or post on the digest. Thank you so much for your help!  Best wishes to all of you and my sympathy for all of you going through illnesses and losses. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to keep up with the digest, but as I said at the start, this has been a really bad year!  Best wishes and thanks!

ME in New Smyrna Beach





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