Mo'i Update...

We called Animal ER this morning to check on how Mo'i was doing, and we got some good news: Mo'i was ready to come home!  I jumped in our trusty old LandCruiser and zoomed up there right away.

Shortly after arriving, the vet tech brought Mo'i out to see me.  Oh, man, he looked good!  Alert, happy to see me, tail wagging, giving me his customary “hug”.  If I didn't know better, I wouldn't have known he'd just had a fairly major surgical procedure.  The photo at upper right is Mo'i after returning home (in his “Elizabethan collar” so he doesn't chew his staples out)...

The post-operative care is simple in his case: no strenuous activity for a week or so, bland diet (boiled chicken and rice) and small frequent meals for a few days, and a couple of drugs.  Nothing hard at all.  In ten days or so, we'll get his staples out. 

The folks at the Animal ER said that Mo'i was a great patient.  We hear this about him almost everywhere we've ever taken him .– he's friendly, extroverted, and almost impossible to provoke into an angry response.  He takes needle pokes with equinamity, and gobbles nasty-tasting pills like they were doggie treats.  Vets and vet techs all love him.

We drove home via the grocery store, to get Mo'i a nice pile of chicken thighs to boil up and mix with rice.  Once home, he took a little walk, had a small meal, and drank (oddly, he didn't want water, so I mixed a little chicken-flavored “Gatorade for dogs” for him, and he loved that).  Then we took a look at his wound (above left), which looks fine.

The fine folks at Animal ER were happy to make a CD with Mo'i's X-rays for me to take home.  Below are the two X-rays showing his gastric volvutus so clearly that even I can tell that something is wrong.  Note how the bloated stomach pushed other organs around – that must have been epically painful for the poor guy...