a year ago...

Next week marks the one year anniversary of Baxter's first (and hopefully only) visit to the emergency vet. It all started with couple days of soft runny poop which we tried to manage with added fiber in the form of canned unsweetened pumpkin, but his symptoms progressed to vomiting of undigested food and worsened through the evening. Once blood started to show up in both his vomit and stool, we knew we had more than a mild case of upset tummy and set off for the emergency vet in the middle of the night. The diagnosis: hemorrhagic gastroenteritis (HGE). It's hard to say what Baxter might have gotten into that would cause HGE, but we're pretty sure the tiny bit of dead baby bird remains that we caught him eating the day before didn't help. After a night in the animal hospital, Baxter came home to us with the antibiotic metronidazole and his new found favorite food in the world, canned Purina EN Chicken and Rice. May this never ever happen again!

update 6/21/09: hmm, I have no idea how to respond to a comment since it seems blogger just ate my response so I am posting here. HGE isn't typically associated with an overeating incident. In fact, Baxter probably had very little to eat because he was already in the throes of being witheld food for a possible upset tummy. There is no specific known cause of HGE but most theories support the notion that it is a bodily reaction to bacterial/viral toxins and/or parasites, and that stress may also be involved. In Baxter's case, we know he got into that dead baby bird (he didn't kill it, it was already dead for who knows how long and he only ate a SMALL amount before we got to him) and he also got into a nugget or two of rabbit poop (a delicacy, apparently) before his HGE incident. Baxter's gastrointestinal system may have already been compromised by the time he ate this junk. Since he was already serving up the soft serve style poop, he was on a reduced/no food timetable to help settle his tummy. The problem with this, in retrospect, is that Baxter's the kind of small dog that tends to overproduce stomach acid on an empty stomach, as evidenced by the occasional morning yack of bile. So could eating that junk on an EMPTY stomach have been the cause? Was he stressed because he wasn't getting any food? Was it something else?? Oy. Other than keeping our fingers crossed, we try our best now to keep Baxter's poop nice and firm with the addition of Konsyl, metamucil's sugar free cousin, and we supervise his hunts as best we can in a yard that we check for obvious dead stuff (which isn't that often considering we live on less than a third of an acre in the suburbs). Happy Hunting!!