On Friday morning I dropped Lexie off at the vet’s office so she could be put under for a thorough examination.  My hope was that the vet would be able to find something in her mouth or throat that is causing her to not eat.  About four hours later the vet called and said he did discover that she had a dead tooth which needed to come out so he did the extraction.  However, a dead tooth really wouldn’t cause a dog to not eat.  He found nothing else in her mouth or throat.  He did another set of x-rays to see if something showed up that he didn’t see before, but there was nothing there.  He did an ultra-sound hoping that maybe something would be evident to him, but he saw nothing.  He did more blood work to check for a disease called A-Typical Addison’s.  He will have the results back tomorrow.  If the results show sign of the disease I will need to take her back in for further testing to see if this is what she has, but we will have to wait for those results as well.  If the blood work comes back negative, then we are looking at making some tougher decisions.

The vet does have some ideas on what else could be going on, but all of those ideas are neurological in nature and would require a referral to the University for a consultation and likely further testing.  This also means we would be looking at some potentially big dollars in trying to find out what’s going on with her with no guarantee that what they find will be good or treatable.

In the meantime, my new friends over at Keeshond Express have been a wonderful resource of support and information.  They have had such wonderful tips and tricks and today one of those tips paid off and I was able to get Lexie to eat.  She didn’t eat a lot, but after all this time of not eating, she probably doesn’t have a lot of room in her stomach for much food.

Another suggestion I received was to make Lexie an oral hydration formula to help get her electrolytes back up.  She’s been drinking it most of the day and I hope we see some positive effects from that as well.

While I’m certainly happy that Lexie did eat some today, we still have a long way to go and may have some big decisions to make by the end of the day Monday.  It sure isn’t easy watching our 4-legged baby go thru this.  Not having any answers is hard and knowing that the outcome may not be good has been even harder.  So until we feel we’ve truly hit the end of the road, I will keep offering her food and trying to get her to eat with the hope that somehow she will bounce back to live out the rest of life as a happy, healthy Lexie.