We've had to make some changes to how Chance eats due to her megaesophagus. We're having to stick with soft boned meat like chicken. Lamb and pork doesn't get chewed into small enough pieces and we were noticing increased regurgitation.
We've also started chopping her boneless meat into bite sized pieces and making sure she only eats them one at a time. The good news is she really likes this feeding style and the regurgitation has gone to pretty much zero! Feedings take a lot longer now but, as long as it helps her, we are very happy with it. Have been trying to find a source for bone-in lamb cuts. The co-op isn't getting anything good. The last ribs were so hard Chance wouldn't eat them which makes us wonder if they were sheep ribs since she eats pork ribs with no problem.
I went to Whole Foods where they had the perfect size bone. But they were Frenched racks and they come in like that. I decided to head for New Seasons to see if they still get in racks of lamb ribs that they finish in-store but stopped at an ethnic market for the good olive oil. They had lamb ribs, sides of lamb, lamb heart, and lamb liver! The butcher prepped some lamb ribs for me and, while he was getting me a lamb liver, told me they get all kinds of beef, lamb, and goat organs in. He mentioned spleen, kidney, and liver. And he told me I can call by a certain day and ask for some to be set aside for me. So happy!!!! I made it to the Japanese market in the city earlier this year and stocked up on pork spleen and kidney. Unfortunately, they don't carry much beef organ. The market closest to me sometimes has beef and pork liver.
But I found an unlikely new source: the farmer's market. They occasionally have lamb kidney but that is now a hot food item. But they have a hard time moving beef kidney so I can pretty much get as much as I want. I've managed to score about 5 lbs. of lamb kidney total plus I can get cuts of lamb from them. I'll be asking them about pork and beef organs this week. The co-op had a surprise emu order from the the original supplier in Montana. I was able to get 1 of the 5 cases of boneless emu scrap they were offered. Chance loves emu! It's a very dark red meat. The raw co-op I'm part of hasn't had a lamb order since August of last year and the Japanese market I buy my pork and beef organs from seems to have stopped carrying spleen and kidney (both pork and beef.)
So now I get to start trying to source lamb and lamb kidney, and drive into the city to a different Japanese market to get spleen and kidney. Chance's Discoid Lupus got worse so we took her to a new vet on Friday. She put Chance on a bunch of supplements, some through them and some we sourced on our own.
One thing she said was a change of diet may help. She is basing this off of Traditional Chinese Medicine hot/cold stuff and also on results she has seen with other patients with diseases that manifest as skin issues. So she recommended Chance be switched from her raw diet of beef, lamb, pork, elk, and deer and onto a raw diet of turkey, rabbit, duck, fish, and chicken if possible. She said what she is eating are warming or hot foods and Chance needs cooling foods with neutral foods being acceptable. In the diet she recommends, everything but the chicken is cooling, chicken is neutral. I know this diet would need a lot of supplementation and Chance isn't fond of rabbit or fish so I was doing some research into other cooling and neutral meats. My findings were very frustrating. The only thing the sources could agree upon was lamb and venison are warming or hot foods. Some sources said beef and pork were neutral, some said turkey and chicken were hot, etc. Right now we are going to see what the new supplements do for her condition. I'm playing around with the vet recommended diet to see if I can get it to balance over time with no supplementation needed. So far, I'm not having luck. Chance's Raw Journals are on hold for a while, possibly permanently. My husband went into the hospital for almost a month right at the end of July. I wasn't recording what Chance was eating during that period and we haven't gotten back in the habit of keeping track.
Nothing new food-wise has been going on. I'm grateful Chance was on raw during the hospitalization because it would have been almost impossible to have gotten her to eat commercial food. Chance had her annual exam on the last Friday in March at the vet clinic we have been going to since December 2011 with the vet that had been our favorite.
Her vet seemed like a completely different person for this visit. She seemed on edge. Her attitude from the beginning had me so confused/bewildered/befuddled, that I didn't even realize she wasn't doing a real annual exam. First, the vet said Chance was on "a lot" of supplements. This vet has been fine with the supplements she has been on in the past since they are all the standard supplements for joint problems. We buy them as separate powders to make giving them to Chance easier because she refuses to eat chewable formulas. She is only on one additional supplement since last year and that was recommended by her chiropractor. The vet asked with a little snort, "Do any of them even work?" I said yes. She did one of those little sarcastic type laughs where no sound comes out and looked like she didn't believe me. The head to toe exam she performed was technically head to toe, she just didn't bother to check the parts in between. The following Monday at 9:00 a.m., the vet call to tell us Chance's fecal sample tested positive for a parasite called Sarcosystis and wanted to know if the raw diet included raw meat. I know the vet said she didn’t know much about raw diets but I did find this question a bit ridiculous! In her message, she said she knew nothing about this parasite because it is rare but it can only come from eating raw meat and she was going to have to consult with an internal medicine veterinary specialist to see what she should use to treat it. I had never heard of this parasite and I could only find information on how it affects people and horses. When I called the vet back a little after 11, she said it was so rare in this country that she knew nothing about it except it was "one of the worst parasites a dog could get, a parasite you never want to see in a fecal, extremely serious, can only come from eating raw meat" and she was going to contact an internal medicine veterinary specialist who has treated this parasite to ask what to use, for how long, and what to do after treatment. She said even with treatment, this "serious" parasite may not be eradicated. She inferred it would shorten Chance’s lifespan without treatment. I also got "the lecture" about how this is the reason vets are against all raw diets. My 1st thought was to wonder how in all my many months of researching raw meat parasites and illnesses, I had missed the one the vet said was "one of the worst." I knew about Trichinosis, cold-resistant Trichinosis, Salmon Poisoning, liver flukes, tapeworms, prion diseases, salmonella, e-coli, etc. My 2nd thought was "Why have you not called the specialist yet since you are making this out to be a serious health problem? It's been over 2 hours." While waiting for the vet to call back about what the specialist had said, I reached out to other raw feeders to see what they knew. It was 1:30 p.m. before the vet called back to say she "finally got around to calling the specialist" and an antibiotic that works on this type of protozoan parasite was suggested. It was one they didn't stock so she would get that called in to the human pharmacy of our choice so I could get it ASAP and we could immediately begin treatment. Her idea of calling it in ASAP was not the same as mine since I was getting ready to call the vet clinic to tell them I was on my way down to get the damn prescription when the pharmacy said it had just been called in. That was at 5:00 p.m. I started getting information from other raw feeders and found out this parasite can contaminate water sources so it wasn't only from raw meat and it is a coccidia-like parasite. Chance had coccidia as a puppy complete with the typical gastrointestinal upset and horrible diarrhea. She didn't have the gastrointestinal upset or diarrhea. Tuesday I finally had some success finding information on how this affects other animals. The information from Oklahoma State University stated the parasite is non-pathogenic in dogs and cats and no further treatment is warranted. It also said it's common in reptiles, birds, and mammals with most cattle and lamb/sheep being affected. The information from the Merck Veterinary Manual stated that freezing it at 24.8 degrees Fahrenheit for 2 days or at -4 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 day also killed the parasite in experiments. With the exception of 3 meals in late February and the first week of March, all of Chance's food has been frozen at between 0 degrees Fahrenheit and -20 degrees Fahrenheit for weeks, months or even a year. I also found information from a department of natural resources website stating there was a recently discovered infective stage transmitted through infected feces. I sent an email to the vet clinic on Tuesday with this information, including the links to the websites, and asked why she chose to treat, especially since people were asking if a second fecal had been run to rule out a laboratory error. The vet called back on Wednesday while Chance was having her massage so I let it go voicemail. The vet said she chose to treat the parasitic infection with antibiotics SOLELY to prevent gastrointestinal upset associated with coccidia-like infections. And here we thought she was treating it because it was such a bad, dangerous, serious parasite since that was what she kept telling us. She said she based her choice to treat off the research she had done on the parasite. Her exact words: "I went to the trouble of going the extra mile to research the parasite by calling a specialist and asking what antibiotic to use and for how long." If we chose not to treat the parasite, that was up to us and we didn't have to give any more of the antibiotic she prescribed on Monday. We consider it to be common sense and the right thing to do when a medical professional who has no knowledge of a medical situation (including how to treat it) consults with another medical professional who does have that knowledge via first hand experience. I don't see why it was going to any trouble or going any extra distance to pick up a phone and ask "what do you do in this situation?" I guess it was that "trouble" that kept her from calling the specialist for so many hours after telling us just how horrible and dire this situation was. Even after sending the information to the vet clinic and even though the vet said she only prescribed antibiotics as gastrointestinal upset prevention, that vet is still insisting this parasite is extremely serious, must be treated, can only come from raw meat, and cooking is the only way to kill it. Have placed 3 orders so far with the raw co-op this year.
The 1st was for lamb. Beautiful lamb from a farm about an hour south of my house. We got some kidney, boneless shoulder, ribs and ground lamb. The ground was for us humans though. I ended up braving the tail end of rush hour traffic to drive across the river and help sort and load the co-op order and pick up my lamb. The 2nd order is for calf ribs. It comes next month and I'll head out to meet the truck and help out. The delivery location is pretty close to my house. But we have to unload over 3,000 lbs. of green tripe and boxes of calf parts by hand (no lift gate on the delivery vehicle), sort and label everything! The 3rd order is more lamb. Ground for us and boneless shoulder and ribs for Chance. Not much of interest has been happening on the raw feeding front. Chance had a change in her routine this month due to my husband having outpatient surgery. She started having a few problems with keeping bone-in meals down so we have switched her to chicken for a while since it is a nice, easy-to-digest, bone-in cut for her. She still gets red meat for boneless meals though.
Her routine is slowly getting back to semi-normal so we'll be trying her with red meat bone-in cuts soon. She is having the last of her beef roast that has lasted her 3 meals. Not noteworthy except it had a sell by date of 2012 and that means I'm almost through my stockpile of beef from when Chance started on raw! It was towards the bottom of the freezer. All has been pretty quiet on the raw feeding front.
Bought a bunch of organs and heart from the Japanese market, all on short sale. Chance has been eating on that for a while now. The co-op lamb is still gorgeous. Chance is enjoying the ribs and shoulder. Picked up the elk yesterday. Decided to only get 60 lbs. since we still have 60 lbs. of deer from last year in the freezer. And the saintly woman who delivers the Oregon orders (she goes all the way up to near Seattle to pick the stuff up then makes the deliveries) was early so there was no waiting at all. It's thawing in the garage. Very slowly thawing since it's in the 30s/40s during the day and close to freezing at night and our garage is not heated. |
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June 2022
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