Current Protocol

So, what is life currently like with Roland - our greyhound with megaesophagus? First, his treatment. He gets 3 meals a day. That's the most we could handle with both of us working full-time. He's fed from an elevated level, a kitchen chair. His water bowl is elevated and is taken away after his late evening meal. As others before us, we have experimented with different foods - kibble versus canned versus moist versus dry, etc. Currently for the morning meal he gets medium sized kibble with some spoonfuls of canned food, a squirt of LipiDerm, plus one 1 gm pill of sucralfate ground up and mixed with NutriCal. The NutriCal is a high calorie food supplement, which we were giving anyway, and it conveniently holds the sucralfate. Then he also gets one 5 mg tablet of bethanechol and one 500 mg capsule of tetracycline, both covered in peanut butter. For his 5 pm meal, he gets another 500 mg capsule of tetracycline and another gm of sucralfate. At his 10 pm meal he gets 10 mg of bethanechol with about a half a cup of kibble. He has been on this regimen for about a month now and only regurgitates a few times a week, mostly when he gets excited or drinks alot of water all at once. He's also more likely to regurgitate early in the morning. He's maintaining his weight and has not had pneumonia.

As an aside, we call his regurgitation 'blurping' and I'll use that word from now on. That is what is sounds like. There's no retching, like there would be if he was vomiting. Also as an aside, I once checked the pH of the regurgitated stuff and it was right between 5-6 (using pH strips), suggestive of saliva and not stomach acid.