My Labrador Retriever has been sick on and off for close to two months. She’s had me quite worried!
We’ve had her back and forth to the vet three times and made at least one extra visit to the vet on our own just to pick up medication in that time as well. It’s been a worrying and expensive two months with our pup Midnight.
Whatever her “illness” is, it doesn’t seem to be extremely serious, but it’s troublesome. Her appetite started to be poor which for a Lab is very unusual. Then she started have diarrhea quite often and one day she vomited quite a bit and just wouldn’t move. She also seemed to have a fever. It seems that she has yeast in her stool – the Candida Albicans variety .. which can lead to leaky gut syndrome. So we are treating her for the second time in two months with an antibiotic targeted to the bowels. This time she’s on the antibiotic for a whole month! That cost us a bundle!
This last vet visit was the worst. I thought Midnight was going to have to have surgery. We were about to take her for a walk because she hadn’t been acting normal for a few hours and we thought that if she did her business she might feel better. However, once we got out the door she started spinning in circles and yipping in pain. My first thought was that she had a bowel blockage or a twisted stomach. We took her to the veterinarians office immediately.
Lucky for both our dog and us she started passing gas at the doctors office so the doctor just thought it was gas that was bothering her. He gave her an injection of pain medication and gave us enough pain medication to last her the weekend as it happened on a Friday evening. I do now think that she has a partial bowel blockage that evening because she ate a ton of grass that afternoon and she didn’t pass it until the following Tuesday and she was in bad shape until she passed it. I have Crohn’s and I get partial blockages myself quite often so I know the signs and I’m sure that’s what was going on with her. So we are very lucky she didn’t end up having surgery. She was a dog in bad shape those four days though .. She was passing gas and having diarrhea so her bowels were working to some degree but she was obviously in pain.
That was about two weeks ago. She’s doing a lot better now. She’s still on the antibiotics and she’s also getting probiotics to help clear up the yeast and combat the effects of the antibiotics on the good flora in her bowel .. so hopefully she’ll be in good shape again in a couple of weeks.
Man I hate it when my dog is sick. She’s my baby.
