Hi everyone!
I’m back with an update following the biopsy results:
- There is indeed chronic inflammatory bowel disease (at least in the first part) and inflammation of the stomach (though less severe). For now, the vets don't think it’s particularly advanced, and it’s not one of the most common types. They reckon she can live with it without treatment, as long as everything else is fine. If we find we need to look into this specific condition further, they’ve kept samples in stock to investigate what’s wrong, but the tests are very pricey, so we’re exploring other avenues first.
- There is also definitely a food intolerance, and they think the disease and the intolerance are basically feeding off each other and making a mess of things.
So, for the next steps, the treatment plan is as follows:
- probiotics
- antibiotics (to help get the gut flora back on track)
- omeprazole (which worked wonders after the endoscopy to get her digestion back to normal)
- another thing that acts as a stomach coating
If that’s not enough to get everything sorted, we’ll add steroids next week. But if we can avoid them, the vets are all in agreement that they’d rather not. They would, however, help settle the chronic inflammation.
And so, last but not least, we’re switching her dry food. To limit any intolerance reactions, the internal medicine specialist wants a dry food with a fairly "basic" composition.
We’re starting her on "Pro Plan DRM"; I’ll post the ingredients below.
The goal is to avoid something with too much meat, essentially, so it’s a herring-based recipe. Once she’s stabilised, the vet has nothing against the dry food recommended by our very own Be Cool (REAL NATURE WILDERNESS FRESH WATER). The thing that bothers her a bit is that in the Real Nature food, there are quite a few ingredients present in tiny amounts (like "seaweed extract (0.0014%)"), which might just upset my girl’s stomach for no real reason.
We’ll see. Looking at the analytical constituents, you’ll see they probably aren’t the worst on the market, even if, honestly, they aren’t exactly anything to write home about!
