On Man’s Best Friend

Originally published at Kickin’ the new Kuh-nowledge. You can comment here or there.

Kiko, our 6 year old pug, started acting strangely the other day.  He wouldn’t eat his food and he got really squeamish when I approached him.  I didn’t realize until it was too late that he had some serious diarrhea.

What a mess… Well, after a day and a half of this, we decided to take him to the emergency vet. They couldn’t quite figure out what was going on, but they told us to keep an eye on him. They still charged us $100. Not that it wasn’t expected. It would have just been nice to get a definitive answer about something.

Kiko suffered for one more day. Same squeamishness… same diarrhea. We decided to take him to our regular vet this morning when they opened. Kiko spent the whole day there as they ran some blood tests. The upside is that most everything appears to be inconclusive. The downside is that the other side of that “most everything” seems to point to a liver problem. Oh yeah… today’s vet bill was $320.

Unfortunately, we won’t find out all the test results until tomorrow. So we sit here with our little buddy, Kiko… wondering if we’ll get some bad news tomorrow. If the rest of the tests give more definitive pointers toward a liver problem… we may need to get a liver biopsy (~$500) to find out exactly what is wrong.

We’re hoping that Kiko just ate something that he shouldn’t have and that now he’ll start the road to recovery. He seems fine tonight so there is a reason to take the glass is half full approach to this. The way Kiko’s luck works though… I’m preparing myself for the half empty scenario. 

–sam