Stuka Update

After two trips to the vet's tonight, we don't have a whole lot to report. Basically, he's very, very sick and we don't know why. For the first visit, we brought Stuka to be examined. He puked a ton before we left, puked the whole way there and puked in the exam room. It was not pleasant. The doctor didn't feel anything in the crop, but we went ahead and did a flush anyway. She examined what they sucked out. The antibiotics we've been giving him for the past 10 days did their job as there were almost no bacteria at all. There also wasn't any fungus either, which means the anti-fungal medicine would have been worthless. There was a lot of mucus, but no indication of why it was there. The doctor sat with us after the exam and went over a giant list of options, from a $600 endoscopy to a $15 crop motility drug to our choices for euthanasia. She told us to think on it, let her know what we'd like to do and sent us on our way.

After bringing Stuka home and getting him settled back in the big cage (complete with several more vomits), we decided to hope for the the best and prepare for the worst. We're going to give the crop motility drug a try. In order to give it the best shot to work and see some results, we needed to get him started on it immediately so we headed right back out to the clinic for visit #2 to pick it up. There's no guarantee this medicine is going to work at all. In fact, it could make him worse. Since we are going to be gone all of next week, don't want Stuka to suffer needlessly and don't want to put all of this on the pet sitter, we're tentatively planning, short of a miraculous recovery in the next day and a half, to take him in Friday morning to be euthanized. If things continue as they have been, Friday will be day three (possibly four) with no food for him since he throws up everything he eats. We can't, in good conscience, leave on vacation knowing he'll be here slowly starving to death while we're gone. And, if euthanasia is going to be inevitable, I want to be there when it happens.

So, like I said, he's very ill, we don't know why and there isn't a whole lot we can do for him at this point. He's had his first dose of the new medicine. Now we wait and see what tomorrow brings.