MegaesophagusTag Archives

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!

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.

When we feed Lucy now, we are feeding her a blended mix of a can of canned food and a can of water. It’s working really well. And she loves it, of course! We have to keep her head elevated for about fifteen minutes so gravity will help the food move her food down into her stomach, so she won’t regurgitate it because of her megaesophagus.

Well, so far, so good. We have had minimal, if any, regurgitation in the last couple of days! Yay! We are feeding her half the mixture at a time, which seems like a lot to me, but her body is able to handle it. The fewer feedings for us humans, the easier it is. Especially when my husband goes back to work and we won’t have someone home all day to feed her.

My husband and I deserve some diamond rings, and Lucy does too, for all the work we are putting in! But we love Lucy and will do everything we can for our collie girl. We haven’t heard back about the antibodies test yet for that autoimmune disease, hopefully they’ll come back this week.

If Lucy does have Myasthenia gravis, it could explain why she has been low energy all of her life. And she’s also seeming to lose more bladder control. She always had spay incontenence, but lately she lays down and the pee just runs out of her. And when she goes out to pee it’s pretty clear, so we are getting a lot of liquid down her. We might have to consider putting diapers on our smooth collie girl.

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!