Our sweet, quiet, prima donna was gone forever. She was doing more screaming than barking and sounded much like a goose being strangled. Despite Lilly s good weekend, Brenda and I decided to take her to a specialist because we felt that even though she was acting okay at the time, something still was not right. She explained that from the original blood work, it looked like Lilly may have a congenital liver disease known as portosystemic liver shunt . This means that there is an abnormal blood vessel that is diverting Lilly s blood around her liver rather than through it, meaning that the liver could not do its job and filter toxins out of the blood, thus leaving them in her system.
Liver shunts can be internal or external.
If it is external, the blood vessel is tied off so that the blood is diverted to flow through the liver. If the shunt is internal, sometimes it can be corrected surgically, but most likely nothing can be done with surgery. In either case, she will be placed on a low protein diet and monitored very closely by having her bile acids checked every 3-4 months for the first couple years following her surgery. Dr. Miller was going to do a bile acids test to determine the toxic levels in her blood. As it turns out, they did let me take her home, so we went on about our business and waited for the test results which were to be in within 48 hours.