LucyCategory Archives

Lucy Is 10

Yay! Lucy is 10 years old today!  I’m so happy… last year this time when we were trying to figure out why she wasn’t keeping food down, and she lost so much weight, I was so worried she wasn’t going to live to 10 years old.  We found her megaesophagus though and she’s doing so much better now!  She’s still a bit skinny and she has bad days where she regurgitates a lot of her food. But for the most part, she’s doing well.

She loves to eat, and we feel bad that we can’t give her solid treats anymore. We do give her some, sometimes, just before we feed her a liquid meal. Kibble blended with water, mostly.

Sometimes she plays with the other dogs, and my Husband has been taking her to the dog park on a regular basis so she gets too exercise. So she is doing well, and we are happy for her.  Hopefully she’ll have a few more years with us.  Though we realize 10 is getting up there for a big dog.  She seems healthy otherwise. Well, she does have calcification of the lungs, still, but that doesn’t seem to be bothering her.

Yay for Lucy! Happy Birthday Funny Faced Baby Girl Lulu.

Lucy didn’t have a very good day yesterday. We always worry about her when she doesn’t eat, and she skipped two meals yesterday. She ate her first morning meal and her second noon meal, but after that she just didn’t want to eat. And she seems to drop weight if she eats less than four meals a day, and we don’t want her to drop weight.

Lucy and Tatum

My husband reminded me of how her organs might end up shutting down… starting with her esophagus, and maybe now her bladder. She’s doesn’t want to go out to pee much. And so she leaks in the house. It could be just because we have snow outside now and she doesn’t want to go out. But we worry that it could be something wrong with her body, too. The megaesophagus could be just stage one of her falling apart… she needs some new performance parts instead of her old falling apart parts… but that is too sad to think about and so I just love her and hope she has a few more years left with us. This first picture is kinda cute… Lucy is eating in her Bailey’s Chair and Tatum is thinking she really wants to take a lick. But Lucy usually gives a nice solid growl and Tatum keeps her distance. Lucy is a good girl and is very appropriate with her growls.  We love it when Lucy eats well.

Lucy Likes to Eat

Fortunately this morning she ate all her breakfast and even some raw honey, keifer, and coconut oil. All good things that, hopefully, will keep her strong and as healthy as possible for as long as possible.  She also ate her lunch meal and she seemed to be hungry for both, yay!

Lately we’ve been changing our dog beds. We have to have washable beds now. I did buy a water proof liner the other day, and so now perhaps we can buy a cheap dog bed from Costco and put the liner on it so Lucy won’t ruin it. We can’t have dog beds with cedar in them, because we can’t throw them in the washer and they get ruined.

Anyway, so yesterday was a bad day, today seems like a better day. She’s eating and keeping her food and water down.  Going out to pee a bit more than yesterday too. All good things that we take advantage of with our healthy dogs.  We do love Lucy and we do all we can for her as long as we can.

I seem to only get pictures of Lucy in her chair anymore. I need some of her standing… as she does stand and walk around too! But she is just so cute in her chair.

Lucy gets to go to the vet today.  She’s been drinking a lot, and urinating a lot, and her urine is pretty clear, which means she is drinking too much. She could have a urinary trac infection. Or the vet said she could have diabetes, so we are going to test for that too.  And if both are negative, then we will look into some incontinence medication for her.

She’s always had spay incontinence but lately it’s gotten pretty bad. She doesn’t seem to know when she has to go potty. If we make her go out (with much grumbling and growling) she will pee just fine. But if we don’t, she will just lay around and leak. And I’m quite tired of having to clean the bed and wash my sheets. I have one of those water proof mattress covers on my bed, I think it’s the only thing keeping my mattress alive. Maybe something we are feeding her is like a diuretic…? Aren’t diet pills a diuretic sometimes? We don’t give her those though!

Lucy was at the vet on Saturday too… she sounded like she was breathing heavy with something stuck in her breathing tube (what is that called anyway? hrm..). But it turns out she just has a cold, or so they said.  So she’s on benadryl. None of our other dogs seem sick in any way. I wonder if Lucy’s immune system is just weak now that she has the megaesophagus. And we always worry about her because of that, too. My silly collie girl. She’s too young to be sick. She’s not even 10 yet.

Lucy is such a good girl and she’s doing so well with her Bailey’s Chair. Sometimes she still worries us.. okay, most times we are still worried about her. But she’s gained her weight back and her energy is back up to normal, and we are happy about that. My friend Christy reminded me about her lung calicification yesterday (I’d forgotten about it! So wrapped up in her megaesophagus) and we don’t seem to notice that either but we should keep it in the backs of our minds.

Last night, though, she had a bit of an episode where it sounded like she couldn’t breathe, or something was stuck in her breathing tube. I sat up with her for about fifteen or so minutes until it stopped, ready to head off to the emergency vet if necessary. But then she went back to sleep and seemed okay.

She ate breakfast fine this morning, but just now she seemed to have regurgitated maybe half or a third of it. So we are gonna weight an hour or two to feed her again. Poor girl. You can just tell by looking at her that she isn’t too happy when she is regurgitating, or after. Our collie girl is doing so well, but we do worry about her.

Of course we’d be willing to go into debt for any of our dogs if we had too… hoping the debt collection agencies would understand, but they probably wouldn’t! Bleh.

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!