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Originally Posted by JakeysMama  Thanks, I was planning on getting the Lamb & brown rice Natural Balance and the Venison and Sweet Potato. I figured one might work.
Did you transition him with the Primal while he was on medication?
I'm wondering if I should start mixing in the new kibble with his Science Diet while he's on the Metro or wait till he's off. In so scared that if I wait, the food change will just throw him into another flare. |
Yeah, we really didn't have a choice. Had to find something he could eat, poor thing. The idea is to find a novel protein that your dog hasn't eaten before. Our little guy was a pound rescue and his gut was a mess. We didn't know what proteins he'd had before, so we tried venision and then bison, but lamb was the magic ticket for him.
We also had him on metronidazole for a few weeks with no improvement. He vomited everything he ate and he wouldn't eat much. He also had constant diarrhea and was losing weight. Our vet decided to give him a shot of dexamethasone and within two hours he wanted to eat. The shot lasted five days, then we were back to square one with him refusing to eat. Two days later, she gave him another shot, and he immediately started eating again. Five more days, and he stopped eating again. During this time, he had a lot of lab work done and finally a biopsy. About that time, the biopsy results came back and our vet decided to try Budesonide. We had to order that from the compounding pharmacy, so he got one more shot (three altogether) of dexamethasone, and we started Budesonide before the last shot wore off, and we saw immediate improvement. About that time, we also started transitioning him to lamb. His diarrhea never resolved until he was eating lamb and on budesonide, but then it was almost instant. We had him on budesonide about three months altogether and very slowly weaned him off of it. That was in October, and he has done really well since then, with only one little flare which resolved quickly with one week of Budesonide.
I am a fanatic about his diet. He ONLY gets primal frozen lamb patties and a measured amount twice daily. I also buy fresh lamb and dehydrate it myself for his treats. And he gets one small Tropiclean dental cleaning chew at bedtime every night. Nothing else. And literally a bite of anything else will start the diarrhea back up again. Recently I tried the Primal dehydrated lamb that you add water to and even that gave him diarrhea. That was the one flare up he had since stabilizing in October.
Hope this helps.
Diana