It begins. Learning to deal with canine kidney failure

A massive thank you to everyone for the good wishes for Cookie and also the ongoing advice and support.
Why have we decided to include this in the blog? Well the simple answer is that hopefully what we learn through this experience can be helpful for others.

We are no experts and in fact the total opposite is true, we go into this knowing nothing. My guess is that is where most people are when they first get the news and so this where I think the blog will be helpful.

So where are we at? The first thing we needed to do was look at her diet as all of the advice is to get her protein down (protein is a whole blog post on it's own, so more on this later) but also really importantly is the phosphorus and Sodium. Luckily the excellent food she was on, Angell Petco, though too high in protein was very low in phosphorus so gave us a bit of breathing space.

After spending all night reading and talking to people we'd decided we weren't going with a prescription diet and what we decided to try first was a dehydrated holistic kidney support diet from the Land of Holistic Pets up in Scotland. We've met these guys up at the Dog Lover Show and Molly our old girl has been on one of their foods now for a while with really good results so we like their food.

It's very early days and I realise the diet may have to change and nothing is ruled out at this point but that's where we're starting.

Obviously we also have medication and have looked at supplements so will go into those next time. For now she's happy, eating well and seems comfortable.

All of this will be on the blog on the website but just at the moment it's being changed but it should be up and running in a week or so. Thanks again for the love and kindness.