Way behind on posting!

I’m way behind on posting to the blog, but I promise to keep posting as often as I can.  However, we do have some big news here, as the past two months have been a really long pug-related drama.

First, Gadget started having chronic diarrhea.  When it didn’t go away, we took him to the vet, who gave him a shot and some medicine to take.  That worked for a little while, but after his diarrhea came back for another week, we took him back into the vet.  This time, the vet took some blood and noticed that he had really low “albumen” in his blood, basically, because he had not been absorbing enough nutrients from his food.  At this point, Gadget had gone from about 31 pounds to 24.5 pounds, but the low albumen was causing him to have edema (swelling), making him look as though he was bigger than usual.    So, he had to stay in the hospital.  During his stay, they determined that he had to have a biopsy of his lower intestine in order to figure out what was wrong.  So, they checked out all his organs and took a little piece of his small intestine to deliver to a lab for testing.

Finally, Gadget got to come home, but the end of the story (so far) is that he has some serious food allergies, and he has to eat special food (Hill’s Prescription Diet d/d duck formula) to manage the allergies.  He also has to take some steroids every day in order to manage his allergic symptoms (for now, at least).

Now, he’s home and doing fine.  However, his diet is very limited (he can only eat small quantities at a time), so he’s always hungry!  Moreover, because of his restricted diet (which will increase a little bit over time), he’s lost even more weight… he’s now 21 pounds!  He hasn’t been 21 pounds since he was 8 months old (when he became a champion!!!)

Here are some pictures of him… Notice that he’s much skinnier, and you can see his big stitches!