Thank you so much everyone. You have no idea how much it helps to hear your stories and to have your care and support. It’s a truly horrible time and I feel quite helpless to help him. I’ll write to each of you individually later, but I’ll give you an update now.
He’s pretty much stopped eating at all and is shedding weight quickly. We’ve taken him for an ultrasound that shows he has intestinal inflammation, but no growths, no blockages and pretty much left the vet going “I really am not sure what’s going on here?”. Oliver is a conundrum. So we had more blood tests to check his protein levels etc.
The options we have been given are that he has an endoscope to see if the vet can find any more info. Or he could have surgery to see if they can find out what the problem is. In both of those options, he would need sedation (endoscope), anaesthetic (surgery). The blood tests show his protein levels have dropped more, which isn’t surprising since he won’t eat. However, it makes it much less likely that he’d survive exploratory surgery and increases the risk during an endoscope AND the results will take four to five days to come through and frankly, I don’t think he has that long if he doesn’t eat.
So our only two options are euthanasia or cortisone. We can start him on cortisone and see if it makes any difference. It should boost his appetite, but might lead to some further muscle wastage, but it’s really the only option we have at this point. And if he picks up, we can have the other tests later if we want to go that way. So very soon (in an hour or so) we’re going to take him for an injection. It could go the other way and send him further downhill, but I don’t see that we have any option but to try.
The frustrations are that he was super healthy until he wasn’t. And, there is no clear evidence of exactly what is wrong. As long as he’s happy and has quality of life, I’m good to have him treated, but I totally agree with those counselling about ‘knowing when it’s time to say enough’. Even though he won’t eat – and we have tried EVERYTHING – he seems pretty happy. So, I’ll let you know how things go. I feel better being able to DO something. We had a public holiday here yesterday so we were really in limbo with no results and no answers and he wouldn’t eat. So we spent much of last night crying together and he got to sleep on the bed in between us. I think he’ll be glad if we stop dripping all over him.
Thanks everyone, I will write back to you all later on.