Dogs Really Do Take After Their Owners

Hey pals,

My dog, Layla, has had some recent health bother that was spookily familiar to ones of my own. If you’re new here, I’ve been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease in June of this year, it’s new and scary and comes with a lot of life disrupting symptoms.

My dog keeps going off her food, having stomach trouble, eating a lot of grass, being sick and being quite sad and lethargic. She was like this sometime in the summer where she couldn’t keep her food down and we changed to rice, chicken and veg, but it didn’t really help and we summed it up to her just being gluttonous and eating too much for her poor tummy to cope with. Now she gets smaller portions!

Check out this video part six of the dog vlogs !

The most recent case was a bit more worrying, she stopped eating altogether for a few days and anything she did eat came back up. She would have moments of being her usual energetic self but most of the time she was quite sad and tired, and would wake us up in the night to go out and try to go to the toilet. I say try because a lot of the time she wasn’t actually able to go, but she was still pooing sometimes!

So we took the poor sausage to the vet on a Saturday and he diagnosed her with Acute Colitis! Colitis and Crohn’s are in the same family of illnesses and when he told us I couldn’t help but laugh and say, “Wow she really is my dog!” Luckily, Colitis is relatively easy to treat in dogs (can’t say the same for humans unfortunately) So she got two injections and a short course of antibiotics, we have lessened the veg she eats for now as well as we were recommended to keep it plain for the moment, but all should be fine pretty soon!

Watch the Christmas dog Vlog!

10 years ago, long before we had our Layla, we had two dogs called Sparkie and Brandie. Sparkie was sadly very ill at a very young age, we found lymphoma when he was 4 and lived until 5 before he was too ill. My great Grandfather also had lymphoma and I believe he died the same year as Sparkie. We always found that interesting. 2009 was an awful year for me for many reasons but most definitely because of losing my Great Granddad and my dog Sparkie.

Brandie also had health problems, but this one in particular caused no harm but was the reason her hair was so odd! The vet had said she had such odd fluffy hair on her body from a thyroid problem… Both my mother and I have an underactive thyroid. Very weird.

Just something to keep in mind, our dogs sometimes really do take after us in more ways than we think. Take care of your furry friends, because they love us so much.

~ Artie