Coccidia

Well, after about a week of Echo slowly getting better with the diarrhea, he's gone right back to "explosive". We have an unconfirmed diagnosis of Coccidiosis. "Unconfirmed" because this diagnosis was based on 3 things without a fecal test:
1) He was getting better and then got really bad again (yesterday afternoon he had accidents in his crate again - almost a week after it happened the first time)
2) He STILL has diarrhea or very soft poops and it never really firmed up again
3) One of his litter-mates had been diagnosed with it

After last night's episode we called Danielle to ask her what we should be doing about this because it's been a week with no real improvement. She basically cut Marnie off and said she suspects one of two things; either a food allergy or coccidiosis - cocka-what? She went on to tell us to call the vet right away and to tell them we suspect that. So Marnie called the vet on my cell as I continued with Danielle, and the vet wanted to talk to Danielle. So we hung up and our vet called Danielle who worked out that yeah, treat for this organism right away without another test. If it's not markedly better in 3 days, come back in for more tests.
"Great!" I'm thinking... 1 month old and the vet bills are already rolling in! Well turns out that treating this is pretty simple AND cheap (about $15 and no consult fee), and thankfully there are no long-term side effects (not so with severe cases). I found a good read about the organism here if you want to read up on it.

The hardest part of all of this is we have to starve the poor beast for 24 hours and then slowly re-introduce his food. It started last night with 4 pills. (I fed him while Marn picked up the pills - I probably shouldn't have, but I didn't know at the time) He then gets 2 pills per day for the next 3 or 4 days until they are gone.
Echo is staying with his "poppy" today which is great and I'm off tomorrow so we shouldn't have anymore accidents until this clears up.

The nice thing about this is that older dogs (6 months+) build up an immunity against coccidia and have the ability to expel them on their own. They may even be carriers of it and not know it. Also, it's not infectious to humans.

So, hopefully in 3 days he'll be back to normal and I won't have to use the garden hose to clean up the yard!!