These past few weeks have been a rollercoaster of traveling, going back to school, and Messi’s health. Around a week and a half after his surgery, we got to remove his stitches and everything was fine, but Messi progressively got worse during my trip to Ohio. He refused to eat, and it got the point where he had no energy to get up and use the bathroom.

It was so unexpected because he was doing so much better. My mom had to take him to the vet where he stayed overnight for two nights and was fed through a tube and hooked up to an IV. We also took him off the medication he was on, and while it did help him walk a little more, feeding him was still a challenge.

First, he ate some of his regular dog food for a few days, then he stopped eating as much. We switched to beef, and tried to hand feed him as well, but that didn’t seem to work. Finally we were giving him steak, ribs, and venison which worked for a week or two, but then he stopped again. Most recently we’ve been giving him cold cuts, as the vet recommended, and it has been working, but we can all tell he’s getting tired of it.

This whole time we have been giving him a pill that helps line his stomach, so he can keep his food down, and it has been helping him for the most part. It’s hard though, he’s trying to eat and move around, but there’s nothing else the vet can do. We have to wait it out and see if he improves. If that means trying to give him a different kind of food every few days we’ll try, but we don’t want him to be in pain.

For now, all we can really do is shower him with love and kisses, which we will gladly do, but we are paying attention to any clues he’s sending about his pain and watching to see if he’s hurting too much for him to handle. I don’t want him in pain.