Mya is a super bouncy, full of beans, springer spaniel that lives life at a thousand miles per hour.

She had presented a number of times for intermittent episodes of diarrhoea since being a puppy. One occasion, that slowed her down recently, was a particularly horrible bout of diarrhoea, that led her to become quite dehydrated and unwell. So unwell, she had to be hospitalised and treated with fluids and a lot of medication. It was quite a worrying time for her owners, but with all the care, she bounced back (click the link to view Mya full of beans on YouTube).

Following this, and back to full strength, we wanted to get to the bottom of the problem and work out if there was an underlying reason for these episodes, to enable long term management.

Mya came in as an outpatient for the day.  During her day visit, we took some intestinal specific blood tests, carried out an ultrasound scan and gastric and duodenal endoscopy; this involves using a highly specialised camera that we can pass into the stomach and down through into the intestine, allowing us to see the stomach and intestine from the inside and take minimally invasive biopsies, that would have needed major surgical biopsies previously.

Once the small biopsies had been taken, they were sent to the external laboratory for analysis and Mya woke-up from her anaesthetic, unaware anything has even happened!!

The results came back a few days later with changes consistent with inflammatory bowel disease, which now allows us to manage the condition with a few changes to her diet and the use of probiotics.  Currently, this is keeping things on the straight and narrow and Mya is back to her full bouncy (mad) self!!