Week One - A Summary

I am happy to say we made it through the first week! It already seems like I have been doing this forever. We are very lucky that for the most part she is stabilizing quickly and we just have some fine tuning to do. For the most part she is having normal BM's with the exception of her evening poops which were just ever so slightly off. I am wondering if I was feeding her snacks and meals to close together and her body was processing them as one meal. So, adjustments were made! We are back to three meals but have increased the amount of food and we will give it a few days and see what we get. What I am truly amazed at is the difference in volume. Before the enzyme supplement not only were the “gifts” she left nasty looking and smelly but there was a lot. She would go approximately three times a day, roughly 2 C. at a time (this is of course an estimate I did NOT pull out the Pyrex and measure). She is now down to twice a day and less than a half a cup at a time! Of course, my neighbors think I have a dog poop fetish, each morning we go out to the corner of the yard and I coax her, “Do your business” as she gets ready to go I am trying to peer under all that tail hair so I can see how to chart her poop for the day. When she is done she gets a big cheer and we race for the house. I mark down EVERYTHING so that if there is a change in her behavior or physical condition it will jump out at me and I can figure out what change in her diet has affected her. It also helps to identify patterns both healthy and unhealthy. Once she has been stable for a while then I will be able to make the next change to her diet. At this point our goal is regular poop and weight gain. I hope in the future to decrease the amount of enzyme she is receiving.

The following is an example of a chart that I use to keep track of her progress. I have adapted it a few times to meet Piper’s personal needs. I am also trying to develop a monthly chart so that I do not have to hold onto all of the weekly charts.

One of the truly wonderful side affect of treating Piper’s EPI is that our lawn will finally be able to heal. This is a picture of our lawn with divots of grass missing because it was the only way in which to clean up the yard. If you wanted to get rid of the poop you had to sacrifice the grass.