I have the best husband in the world. And Lucy has the best Dad. She has megaesophagus… as you might know from prior posts. If anyone has missed out… she no longer has muscles in her esophagus that can move her food into her stomach. So if she eats regular food, the food gets stuck in her enlarged esophagus and won’t go down. She ends up regurgitating it a couple hours later.

She lost six pounds before we figured out what was going on. Now she is gaining most of the weight back and you can’t feel her ribs so much. My husband built this Bailey’s Chair for our collie girl Lucy. The original design was for a dog named Bailey. We got the plans and my husband built it this week. Doesn’t it look great! He did an awesome job! And he even used leftover paint, wood, and soft tiles so he didn’t spend much money on it.

We were holding her up on the couch, but we wanted to get her more vertical. We also wanted to get a way that we didn’t have to sit with her for 20 minutes every feeding. And we feed her four times a day.

She gets 2/3 cup kibble, 1/2 can wet, and water blended together in a blender… she gets that mixture twice a day and we cut it into two meals each. So four meals a day. And so far, it’s working really well. She doesn’t like to stay in it for 20 minutes… but we are feeding her, and then we let her lick some honey out of a bowl when she is still.

I don’t want her to learn that struggling gets her out of the chair. So when she is still, she gets a lick of the honey, which she loves. And so far, so good. She struggles a little, but not really so bad.

She is our baby girl, we want her to live many years yet! She’s only nine and a half!

Well, now that the initial shock of Lucy’s megaesophagus is over… the stress is settling in. Usually I can take charge of a situation and handle it at first. Do what needs to be done. And then later the whole impact sets in and I start to really get bothered by it.

Our collie girl Lucy is doing okay.. and I think my husband is doing a better job with her than I am when it comes to feeding. She actually struggles more for him when he holds her up for 15 or 20 minutes after we feed her the liquid diet. And maybe that helps move it down better? Rather than for me where she sits pretty still. I’m more of a boss than Dad is. But it seems for me she regurges more than when Dad feeds her.

If we have our water buckets out and she drinks, she will regurgitate it about an hour after unless we catch her and hold her up. If her food doesn’t go all the way down, it seems two hours will go by before she regurgitates it. And watching and hearing her regurgitate is breaking my heart. Yesterday she lost most of her breakfast. But she kept the rest of the meals down.

Last night about 3am she was regurging water. And it splashed on the wood floors in the bedroom. I ended up just getting up and putting a towel down under her and letting it happen. We are cleaning up after her a lot. Or having a towel under her when she throws up. We don’t really care about the house… that’s why we have tile floors and wood floors. But we care about her. Okay we care about the house too, LOL, but we care about our dogs a zillion times more.

It’ll be this way the rest of her life. I figure the stress of it will lessen for me as time goes by. Her weight is holding steady, but we want her to gain. This is like best diet pill, except it’s the worst way to diet! She’s only nine and a half. The girl is too young for this. But we do what it takes to keep her healthy and happy. Hopefully we’ll be able to do this for some years to come, we don’t want to lose her.

Well Lucy is home.. the husband went and picked her up. The good news is that the vets didn’t find anything bad in her esophagus. It is definitely enlarged, thus the Mega esophagus… but there is no evidence of tumors or anything else bad. And the sphincter between the esophagus and the stomach is fine, too. They even put the scope in her stomach and looked at it that way too, and no sign of anything bad. So they didn’t use the balloon to make it bigger since it’s normal sized.

So the next guess is maybe she has Myasthenia gravis. It’s an autoimmune disorder that can cause the weaking of muscles, and maybe that’s why her esophagus is loosing strength and isn’t pushing the food into her stomach anymore. Our vets are going to do an antibodies test for it… if that comes back negative, they are going to diagnose her finally as this being “idiopathic” which means, basically, that they just don’t know what is going on.

We’ll get the test results back for the Myasthenia gravis in about 7 to 10 days. It’s good that she is healthy otherwise… but still, I do wish we knew what was causing this collie’s Mega-E!