We have good news and bad news.\u00a0 The good news is that Kiko doesn’t have some crazy life-threatening liver disease.\u00a0 The bad news is that Kiko has a liver shunt.\u00a0 It’s basically a blood vessel that diverts blood from the liver.\u00a0 The liver is a blood filtration system.\u00a0 If the blood is diverted, it doesn’t get filtered…\u00a0 and toxins get all over the place where they shouldn’t be.\u00a0 The other problem is that since Kiko has had this shunt since birth, his liver is smaller than it should be for a dog his size.\u00a0 So even if the blood wasn’t being diverted right now, his liver might not be able to handle everything.<\/p>\n
There are two options.\u00a0 One is to change Kiko’s diet so that it limits the amount proteins (especially red meat) in his diet.\u00a0 The first few days of the diet change was tough.\u00a0 Kiko was still under the effects of pain medication and since his stomach was upset he wouldn’t eat.\u00a0 And when he did eat, it was a token scrap here or there.\u00a0 We supplemented his food with yogurt, cottage cheese, canned salmon, pumpkin, brocolli.\u00a0 One day he would eat a meal with gusto.\u00a0 The next day he would look at his bowl for a second and walk away.\u00a0 If you’ve ever seen Kiko eat a meal, you know that this is truly troubling behavior.\u00a0 This dog’s one love in life is food and he usually eats like a machine gun.\u00a0 Fast and furious.\u00a0 He’s slowly come around though, and he now is eating with the same passion he had before this incident.<\/p>\n
The second option is surgery.\u00a0 If the liver shunt is external, they can basically put a constrictor on the blood vessel.\u00a0 This constrictor will, over a period of 4+ weeks, slowly close the blood vessel and restore normal blood flow to the liver.\u00a0 The reason it takes so long is that suddenly shutting off the shunt would result in serious liver problems.\u00a0 The liver just wouldn’t be able to handle the new blood flow.\u00a0 At least that’s my understanding of it.\u00a0 Most dogs survive this surgery (95%).\u00a0 The only problem here is that it will like cost around $3000 or more.\u00a0 Since we don’t have that kind of money stashed in our mattress, we’ve opted to go with the diet change until we can save up enough money for surgery.<\/p>\n
Long story… short.\u00a0 Kiko’s a trooper, and he appears to be doing much better now than he was when we first noticed problems.\u00a0 We still need to watch him like a hawk to make sure he isn’t relapsing, but so far… so good.\u00a0 Fingers crossed and all that.<\/p>\n
As for Bentley.\u00a0 His back is still bad.\u00a0 I mean, you can’t slip a disk and expect things to be coming up roses every time you wake up, if you know what I mean.\u00a0 That said, he’s still 100% Bentley.\u00a0 He still manages to make me crack a smile every day.\u00a0 He has about three more weeks of crate time before he can start walking around a bit more.\u00a0 We made a mistake last night and let him stay out of his crate while we were both working upstairs.\u00a0 Bentley let us know his anger at being neglected by peeing on the living room floor.\u00a0 And then he started doing his trademark Bentley “howl” as if to say…\u00a0 “What you gonna do, punk ass?”<\/p>\n
I was pissed (pardon the pun) about the piss, but when he started to do his shtick I smiled and took his wobbly ass outside for a proper potty.\u00a0 That dog is too cute to be mad at him for any length of time.<\/p>\n
And that concludes this episode of the All My Pugs Update.\u00a0 (Am I the only one that remembers Clarence and the All My Children update?)<\/p>\n
–sam<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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