Feeding Time

Katy has to be fed with special considerations, because with her megaesophagus, her food is not pushed down into her stomach. So, she has to eat at a 45-90 degree angle and stay that way for at least 10 minutes. A lot of the mega-e sites talk about this thing called the "Bailey chair" that people make that has the dog sitting straight up, like they are begging. I have sent off for the directions for this "chair", but I don't know if I will make one or not. For one, Katy, unlike other mega-e dogs, has no problem with food reversal (to borrow a hot-dog eating contest phrase), her problem is with liquids. Secondly, she really doesn't like to sit like that, and so I'm concerned that the chair will stress her out more than help her. So while I'm tossing that idea around, I am using one of the other suggestions: meatballs.

I take one part ground up dry dog food and add one and one half water and let it soak for about 30 minutes, and then and another part of canned dog food and mix that up, along with whatever crushed up medicine she needs to take. Then I roll this mixture into individual "meatballs". Some of the people on the internet actually make food from scratch for their dogs, with real ground meat, but I don't want to mess with that and trying to get the vitamins and supplements right. Anyway, I feed her the meatballs one at a time. The idea behind the meatballs is that the food is all stuck in one ball that can roll right down the esophagus intact, where loose food might sneak its way into the lungs and cause pneumonia. I didn't start this tactic until after Katy got pneumonia, so I don't know yet how effective it is in preventing pneumonia, but hopefully, it's pretty good, since the x-rays and the medicine get pretty expensive.

This is what Katy's meal typically looks like. She gets one order of meatballs four times a day; two for breakfast and two for dinner.

Each meatball is about one inch in diameter. Any bigger, and she has to chew her food, and that defeats the purpose, because then she'll have loose food going down to her stomach.

Max is also getting four little meals a day, so there is equity at dinner time. It also keeps him from "horking" down his food. We make him sit or lay down for the ten minutes as well, because if he is bopping around the living room while Katy has to sit, she wants to join him.

Speaking of hot-dog eating contests, the guy who won the 4th of July Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, Joey Chestnut, ate 66 hot dogs in about 12 minutes. He beat the runner up by 3. Here's a picture of him with 66 (uneaten) hot dogs. I don't know how many Pepcids he swallowed afterward.