Mega What?

The little guy was a month old when we first met him. At that point he was indistinguishable from his littermates, a piebald collection of swollen bellies and stubby whiptails. I was more interested, in fact, in the adults. So this was what they looked like, so this was how they behaved. The sire was a contented suck of a thing, quite amenable to scritches and belly rubs. So far, so good.

Two weeks later we returned, this time bringing our friend and her son, our “almost son”, who lives with us part of each week while his flight attendant mum walks the aisles to England and back. The breeders were able to assess us as a family unit, to better choose the right dog for us. They could see how mild-mannered our friend is, and how gentle her 10-year-old. I was sitting on the floor when one puppy, a sable with a white spot on his nape, crawled into my lap and fell asleep. Three weeks later, he was ours.

We wanted a Cardi who wasn’t too headstrong, one who was more laidback than feisty, more sweet than sassy. The breeders knew that, and chose the little sable accordingly. He did not look sick, just quiet and good-natured.

We brought him home in mid-November, when he was nine weeks old. A few days later he started puppy preschool. I was a little disappointed that he kept getting sleepy and refusing the motivational treats before the 45 minutes were up, but he was the youngest and smallest in his class. Also, around this time, I phoned the breeder to say that poggles didn’t seem to have much of an appetite. She said not to worry, dogs are simple: If a dog doesn’t eat, he isn’t hungry. Fair enough.

Early in the new year, Puppy started tossing his food. Probably normal, I thought; sometimes young children toss their cookies because of a still-wimpy epiglotis.

Then Puppy started tossing his training treats. Then Puppy started tossing his water. Now I was getting frightened. I reported it to the vet twice during the month of February. She wanted to know whether it was vomit or regurgitation? Regurgitation, I replied. His drinking water would simply fall out almost immediately, but his kibble might reappear anytime after eating.

That was when my partner and I first heard about megaesophagus. The vet suggested a barium x-ray, we said sure, and at exactly six months of age our puppy was diagnosed.

We discussed the x-ray with the youngest vet in the clinic. He was almost as upset as we were; this was his first experience with megaesophagus, and he said the older vet had seen only three cases in 25 years of practice.

The young vet pulled no punches.  Our pup could possibly be dead in a few months. Besides not getting enough nutrition, besides the risk of dehydration, there was the possibility of aspiration. This means that poggles might regurgitate during his sleep, get the food up his pharynx and into his lungs, and contract pneumonia, or simply suffocate if he were already weak enough.

Wow.

I wasn’t ready to watch a puppy die. Really, I wasn’t. I called the breeder to discuss bringing him back. She was familiar with the disease; she had had an Irish Wolfhound with megaesophagus once, but had never seen it in any Cardigan. But she assured me of two things: one, that megaesophagus can often be managed, with the dog living a full life; and two, that we had adopted this puppy in good faith, and that she would reserve us another puppy for free whenever we asked, no matter whether this one lived twelve more days or twelve more years. See if you can’t hold out a little longer, she said. So we held out.

As you’ll have noticed if you’ve looked at my earlier blog entries, text and photos, we now have one sleek, happy, muscled mite on our hands. We also have a much lower paper towel budget. Has poggles outgrown his megaesophagus? Well, he’s certainly outgrown the misery of it. While he still has the condition, it’s much less intrusive than it was a year ago. Tomorrow I’ll write about our experience in managing the malady.