Hi everyone, I could really use some help on next steps for my 3-year-old Westie. She has been diagnosed with bilious vomiting syndrome, and the internal med vet figures she has acid reflux/GERD. She has, for over a year, off and on, vomited bile very late at night or really early morning. Then often, not the next, but the following day, she will not be able to eat breakfast, her tummy will growl horribly for a few of hours, and she is quite nauseous but does not get sick again. Sometime later in the day, she can start eating again.
This started with just an incident once or twice a month and then went to once a week and then every couple of days to the point that she is npw having some degree of nausea and issues daily. She never throws up food, and almost always, the bile incidents are in the AM – also, she never has diarrhea.
She has been through many diet changes and has a boarded nutritionist. We are pretty sure that a food change in December made things worse, as she began to burp a lot! The smacking, hard swallowing, a lot of yawning, and occasional odd sound when eating or trying to play started as well. She appears to be nauseous to some extent most of the time now. Also, several weeks ago we tried the probiotic visbiome and that made things much worse! She was so nauseous and could not stop burping! We obviously stopped giving her this.
On top of this, she has nasty environmental allergies that are horrible in spring and not great in the fall. Also, some food allergies and certainly food sensitivities. Chicken is definitely a no go!
Yeast, she battles with on her mouth and on her personal area. Sadly the creams and shampoos for this she is so sensitive to that the cure is causing her as much discomfort as the yeast. Has anyone found something that does not cause massive skin irritation?
We are working on transitioning her over to home-made venison, sweet potato, butternut squash, and plain old pasta diet — she seems to have trouble with digesting grain; even white rice does not go well – worried about heart issues, though without it.
The nutritionist is going low-fat with this for GERD, but does anyone have thoughts as to if this combo looks good for acidic belly/reflux issues?
Here is the big question though — she was on Pepcid for 12 days, and it stopped the morning vomiting, and she was able to eat all her meals each day. She was still nauseous off and on, but better than before. Then it stopped working which I read a study saying that by around day 12, the drug lost its potency for dogs, and this sure seemed to be the case her.
We tried Prilosec, and it made her so sick! The burping kicked back into high gear, the nausea was awful, and she threw up and not just bile. She just does not seem to be able to tolerate this. The vet has recommended Raglan, but it scares me. Have others tried this and did it work, and what were the side effects? Also, it is for short-term use, so I do not understand what to do for the long term. All these drugs you are not supposed to keep them on, so how do you manage this ongoing? Does anyone have recommendations? Is Raglan a good next step, or should we be trying something else less extreme? Are there other options? Any advice or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. We are feeding her 4 smaller meals throughout the day, and she has a raised dish. We tried feeding before bed, but that seemed to make it worse. She did have an abdominal ultrasound, and everything looked normal. I know we may need to do more aggressive testing, but we would like to try everything we can before going there – putting her through anesthesia and more stress is not something I take lightly in her current condition. Thank you very much!
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