Poor Louie does not respond very well to any change. I've recently felt a need to stretch his remaining food by adding rice, which, of course, cuts the nutritional value of his meals and also severely limits the amount of fat he gets. Even though he is already on a very fat restricted diet, he still needs to get some amount of fat as it is important for certain biological processes. So, over the past few weeks, his skin has gotten dry and he's been a bit lethargic due to decreased nutrition and fat.
Last night and today, feeling confident that we would have food for him to last a while, I decided to improve the quality of his meals again and I limited the rice content, giving him a richer mixture than he's had for a while. It was maybe 3/4 of the Royal Canin food to 1/4 rice.
I believe the change was too sudden for him, as we came home from an evening out today to find evidence of diarrhea (a lymphangiectasia symptom) in his crate. It happens; we cleaned him up and put his bed in the wash, and he's sleeping here next to me right now.
What is hard about this situation in general for us is that it is so hard on him. He's just a little dog, extremely sensitive to any changes to his diet. With luck, he will get used to the relative richness of the straight product again in a few days. It's possible, also, that his lymphangiectasia will flare up again in full, that his remission from the disease will cease and that we will find ourselves back where we were a year ago. This is always a possibility with this disease. Each time something like this happens, I hope and pray that he will be okay.
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