Giardia

I’ll cut to the chase and give you the end of the story first: Juli has Giardia.  Last weekend she started having, to put it nicely, some intestinal distress.  We thought she had just eaten something bad because she wasn’t displaying any other symptoms.  By the next evening she was getting seriously lethargic and was getting up every 2 hours to poop.  It became pretty apparent that something was seriously wrong.

Kris took her into the vet on Monday morning and they were able to diagnose her Giardia pretty quickly.  It’s a disgusting parasite that is passed through drinking infected water or stepping (or eating – yuck!) in infected poop.  Around 30% of dogs are carrying it at any time, but most are just carriers and are never affected.  But for the lucky few, it multiplies in the dog’s intestines and wreaks havoc.  It even looks evil:

This could be the lead character in a horror film.

It can be pretty difficult to get rid of, so we have 10 days of medicine, then we’ll have her poop tested and if it’s not clean we’ll have to do another round of medicine.  The medicine is really bitter and getting her to eat it twice a day has been a big challenge.  At first we could hide it in hot dogs (our usual sneaky trick) but she’s started pulling the pills out before eating the hot dog.  So we’ve resorted to soaking her food in water, then dissolving the pill with her food.  She gives us a look before she eats it – she knows something’s not right.  Smart dog

After the first week of medicine she’s doing tons better and her energy is back, but she’s not 100%.  Hopefully the test on Thursday will show that the evil Giardia is totally gone and we’ll have our wonderful happy puppy back.