Jemma was more than happy to model the hat for us.
Buenos días, I'm a Mexican Chihuahua!
In other news, Jemma went for a blood test last week. No vet pics, sorry, but I am very happy with the results that got faxed back to me. The number I always watch very closely is the post bile acids because of her liver disease.
Click to enlarge. I've blurred out everything else to just focus on the pre and post bile acids.
My apologies, this was taken with my iPhone and it's not the best quality.
The bile acids blood panel test has two parts. The pre value is the amount of bile acids circulating in the blood after an overnight fast. After that blood draw, a high fat meal is fed, wait 2 hours to let the liver do its job at filtering out toxins and absorbing back the bile acids (stored in gallbladder), and then another blood draw (post).
Dogs with liver disease will show elevated bile acids numbers because the liver is impaired in some way and is unable to absorb back the bile acids fast enough, even 2 hours after eating.
With a healthy liver, the post value should only be slightly higher than the pre value. Jemma was first diagnosed with liver disease when we found out her post bile acids was mildly elevated. Since then, we have been managing it via diet and supplements quite successfully.
In June of 2011, we started a new diet regimen after discovering an awesome new (to us) vet clinic and we have watched Jemma's post bile acids climb down slowly, but surely, ever since. You can read more about that experience in these posts: Jemma and Her Liver (Part I) and Jemma and Her Liver (Part II).
For the last blood test Jemma had, her post bile acids was sitting at 10.7. That was 6 months ago. I kept up with the new diet/supplements and today, she is at 8.5. Looking at the results, she goes from pre at 6.6 to post at 8.5. The vet said, "8.5 is now considered only slightly higher than the pre bile acids value", which is what we want!! You cannot imagine how happy I was to hear those words from him. He is so good at what he does and we're ever so grateful to have found him. I study canine nutrition extensively and often put together diets for dogs. I am serious when I say that most vets, even holistic ones, have no clue what I'm talking about a lot of the times, but our vet not only knows, he can build off it. It is rare these days to be able to find a vet that is both well-versed in diagnostics AND nutrition...and our vet is absolutely phenomenal in both.
The results mean that Jemma's liver, although still dysfunctional in some ways as Hepatic Microvascular Dysplasia is congenital and cannot be "fixed", is behaving like a normal + healthy liver. It is able to remove most of the bile acids within a 2 hour time frame after eating a high fat meal.
It will be interesting to see if it's possible to go even lower than this. We will re-test in a few months after her body gets to "heal" even more from eating the new diet and supplements. I'm not hoping for anything though - this is already much more than what we could have ever hoped for!
