Dog scan follow up

The past few days, Simba hasn’t been eating much of his kibble at all, so yesterday we tried giving him some wet food thinking maybe he was having problems with his teeth making him not want to crunch down on his kibble. He ate some wet food we’ve been using to give him his medication with, so I ran out to buy some cans of wet dog food to see if he’d eat more of that. He snarfed down 1/3 of a can, which seemed encouraging.

This morning, he didn’t want to even eat the wet dog food, and didn’t seem like he was feeling very well.

A lab not eating is a Serious Thing. Fortunately Simba’s vets (Riverbank Vet Clinic) are awesome and they were able to work us in this morning.

Some follow up x-rays showed what appeared to be thickening of the walls of his stomach and, like with the previous x-ray, his stomach appeared unusually dense on the radiograph. This time he hadn’t eaten anything, so it wasn’t full of food like it was a couple weeks ago.

The stomach (upper right of the ventral-dorsal image) is quite dense and the stomach walls look quite thickened. That likely reduces what his stomach can hold too.

Vet suggested giving people food (chicken and rice) to see if he’d eat that. When we got back home, I made up some chicken and rice which he ate (very encouraging), but still turning away from his kibble and the canned food.

So now, as long as he’s eating, we’ll do what we can to make sure he’s feeling ok and comfortable. At some point though (could be a week, maybe months, who knows) he’ll probably get to the point where he won’t want to eat again. Then it will be time for that last visit to the vet.

He’s a good boy.