Freckle & Ceilidh’s Blog

We’ve been BUSY in our house. For the past couple of weeks, Freckle has had tummy problems which we just assumed were related to switching her to a home diet. Before this she’d been eating a mixture of oatmeal, turkey (or salmon or chicken), veggies and kibble. But with the commercial pet food issue, we decided to switch her to home diet sooner rather than later.

However, a few days ago, Ceilidh also had diarrhea—and one bout of vomiting. Off we went to the vet and came home with assorted remedies for both of them and antibiotics for Ceilidh. When we gave Ceilidh her first (massive!) pill, we saw that her remaining canine tooth was sticking out at a strange angle and was really, really LONG (check out the photo above!)! In fact it looked like she had a sea lion tusk in her mouth. And it was wiggly … like a child’s front tooth about ready to fall out. Back to the vet, and dental surgery the following day.

As you recall, Ceilidh has only one lung, so surgery/anaesthetic is always a concern. And she IS almost 13! But she came through it all without any problems and must feel so much better to have the tusk gone from her mouth. The only thing is that now, eating her food is a pretty messy affair as the tusk was the last of the front teeth. Now, she puts her face over her dish and it’s as if you put an electric mixer in a shallow bowl and turned it on high. The contents of the bowl end up all over the kitchen! It must be extremely frustrating for Ceilidh because she has to run all over the place scooping up the bits that fly off. It’s a dog’s life!

Back to Freckle … she’s now on antibiotics as well and is eating a prescription hypoallergenic food … and is feeling much better. We’re not sure yet what protein we’re going to find for her since she may be not tolerating the chicken/turkey option. Her prescription food includes duck and pheasant but our pheasant supply here in Vancouver is a little lean. We’ll find something.