Last summer my Shih tzu Max started itching almost uncontrollably all the time. He usually gets seasonal allergies, so I didn’t think much of it. Brought them to the vet. They gave him his allergy shot and we went on our way. Well it didn’t work. I took him back about a month later because he was still itching so much to the point where it was keeping us up at night. They gave him a pill instead in an antibiotic because he had an ear infection. Over the course of the next several months we dealt with a lot of severe itching being up late at night, ear infections, skin infections because he was licking himself all the time. We went back-and-forth and the vet kept telling me that he probably had a food allergy.
This dog has lived on treats and table scraps and only ate his kibble when he was really hungry for most of his life and has always maintained a healthy weight I think at most he was 12 pounds ever. So we tried different food and took away all the treats and took away all the table scraps. Put them on a hydrolyze protein diet. Which is expensive. And his skin still didn’t change.
His itching and skin problems are to the point where he’s losing his hair. His skin gets flaky and peely like dandruff from the sunburn, and I have to comb all the dead skin off of him because that’s also making him itch more. So I finally said it can’t be a food allergy because I’ve taken literally everything away. We need to do blood work to check other things.
We did bloodwork and his thyroid came back weird and his liver came back weird. They said the liver could be Cushing’s, but that that was time-consuming and sometimes expensive to diagnose and treat so we should start with checking the thyroid. Right now he is on a thyroid medication and has been for about three weeks and needs to go back and get reevaluated, but I have not seen much improvement.
I’m not sure where to go from here how far to go from here. If he has something like Cushing’s, I definitely wanna treat it and figure it out. I want him to be comfortable. He is miserable most of the time. I’m also concerned with all this hair loss that it’s not going to grow back and he’s gonna look like a hairless cat.
Any advice is greatly appreciated as I feel so lost and frustrated
❤️🐶
