I was asked yesterday how our new year is going so far. I hadn’t quite thought about it until then, but my answer was that it has been a bit rough so far. Unfortunately, it only has gotten rougher.
For the last few weeks we have been having some various health issues with our puppy, Aspen, and after she spent 24 hours in emergency care, we learned that she has kidney dysplasia. This basically means that her kidneys have lesions on them that prevent them from working completely. Her kidney function is about 25% right now. We are uncertain what the long-term prognosis is, but we are optimistic that we will be able to manage her disease with a strict diet.
The vet sent us home with the only kidney-specific dog food they had and Alex and I were disgusted by it, so we plan on returning it. This dog food did not contain a single food ingredient – it was all chemicals. We did some research about a holistic or homemade kidney diet for Aspen and found that the best bet is very low phosphorus, a moderate to low amount of high-fat proteins and a lot of water. We’ve found an extremely helpful website that has a table with a variety of foods and their phosphorus, protein and fat breakdowns that we will use to manage the household food we will give her. The website also gave unbelievably helpful comparisons of food we can purchase for her. We’ve decided on Grandma Lucy’s holistic dehydrated food which will give her a complete and balanced diet within the kidney-specific guidelines. Thankfully it’s available at our local pet store and is reasonably priced.
All of our other research has been pretty scattered, which is a bit unsettling for the long-run, but we’re still holding out hope for our sweet pup. We will be meeting with a specialist on Thursday, so we are anxious to come up with an official game plan for her long-term care needs and kidney management.
Aspen is home with us now and is hungry, alert, active and sweet as ever. Regardless of what we learn in our next appointment we will be enjoying our sweet girl and monitoring her health very closely. We will use this site to keep you updated with Aspen’s condition, but I don’t think we’ll have much more to report until after our appointment on Thursday. Now, I’m going back to play with Aspen!