Every day a little doo…

[WARNING: This blog post is about dog health. If you're squeamish, skip this post.]

Sunday was a hard day. I got up on the early side, and Linda and I started to make brunch plans. Niki was running around, being his normal self, and I caught a glimpse of something in his butt fur.

I took a closer look, and it was blood. I woke Andrew, called the emergency vet, and collected a sample of bloody diarrhea from the backyard. I checked Elphie, but she was all clear, so off we went to the emergency vet.

The emergency vet is not a good place to be, ever, and that's really frightening. Especially when you're holding a bag of bloody dog poop.

Niki was really good with the vet, who suggested that the bleeding may have been caused by stress, or trying too hard to poop. You know, straining. We were sent home with instructions to keep an eye on him and bring him back if he got worse. We felt much better.

This whole time, Niki is his usual self. No fatigue, no change in behavior, NOTHING. That was the most unnerving thing.

An hour later, there was significantly more blood. Back we went to the emergency vet, where they ran a bunch of tests on his poop and his blood. The first good news that they rushed to tell us was that there was no problem with his coagulation (woo!). Next, the vet came out and gave us a list of what could be the cause of the bleeding.

The list included:

-Hemorrhagic GastroEnteritis (possibly caused by bacteria)
-Colitis
-A parasite

She also mentioned that the bacteria could have come from pig's ears, and the top two could be caused and/or aggrivated by stress.

Strangely enough, the treatment for all three was antibiotics. We've already seen an improvement in how much blood there is in his stool, and it also appears to be firming up.

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