June 2016

A couple weeks after stopping the laser treatments, I decided to stop giving Lyla the Miralax and Cisapride. It did not seem to be helping her, only in having liquid stool constantly leaking. She was passing very small amounts of stool daily with my assistance. I periodically gave her enemas, with no results. Finally June 18, 2016, Lyla had not passed any stool in a couple days and was not eating well. I took her to the vet where x-rays confirmed her colon was full of stool again. The vet attempted to remove stool without anesthesia. Lyla was too upset for this to happen. She ended up having anesthesia and undergoing 2 hours of procedure to have more copious amounts of stool removed from her rectum. This was getting to be too much. I did not like seeing her go through this every month or so. It was hard on the both of us. The vet and I talked about the medications and that I did not think they were helping. The vet said that he was going to call a surgeon who specialized in this type of thing to see if surgery was a good option for Lyla... It was not... The surgeon said that although cats have good success with a colectomy, dogs do not. Medication management is the best option. The surgeon recommended the Cisapride and Miralax, along with a low residue (low fiber) or high residue (high fiber) diet. To try one and see how it works.

Lyla is a small 18 pound Frenchie. I work outside the home during the day, so I am only available to give her medications twice a day and not three. We decided to try 0.2mL of Cisapride and 1/4 tsp. of Miralax twice a day mixed in a tablespoon or so of wet dog food. My vet recommended trying the low residue diet first and suggested something sold at Petco by Eukanuba. I was not overly familiar with Petco, but I figured I would walk right in, find what I needed and go. Wrong. I walked down the aisles looking for anything that read 'low residue' and then looked through everything made by Eukanuba. Nothing. So I asked the girl who worked there. She was totally confused by the word 'residue'. When I explained that I wanted low fiber, she suggested a wet food would be the lowest. I wanted to stay away from this if all possible, so she suggested Blue Buffalo. But when we looked at the nutrition information, it was 5% fiber. Lyla's current prescription dog food was 3.5%. This didn't make sense to me. I spent a great deal of time walking through the aisles and reading nutrition information. I didn't find anything that appealed to what I was looking for, so I left empty handed.  I did some research online and found that the Eukanuba dog food that my vet was referring to was actually from Iams. I did not like the reviews I read on it and it had 4% fiber, more than what Lyla was currently on. I decided to keep Lyla on her current food and see how things went.