Animals

Loki and Sonny watching Ming eat. Loki praying that she doesn't eat it all.

Ming and Loki resting after a hard day.

Tux and Halley resting after a hard day of running the house.

We've had a hard time with Loki and his stomach recently. Actually, he's not been well since we got him at about six weeks old. His stomach has been a problem for some time.

It got so bad that we took him to the vet the vet recommended pepsid and anti gas pills and we started to give them to him in coupious quanties. It would help him for a couple of hours and then he'd start to pant really hard again. The vet said that St. Bernards just had delicate stomachs. I thought that was odd since the St. we had when Iwas a kid didn't have a delicate stomach and my brother had had five and he'd never mentioned that any of them had delicate stomachs either.

At any rate the vet had no desire to do any tests and seemed absolutely positive about the diagnosis and what we needed to do for Loki.

Well we did it for a good while. Then the last week of May Loki threw up five out of seven days. And he threw up a lot. The last time he threw up was on Friday and I lost my mind. I ranted that there was something more here than just a delicate stomach and we were taking him into the vet to have tests run (something, as I said, that the vet seemed unwilling to do).

So the little woman, got on line and went to http://www.justanswer.com/ and typed in Loki's symptoms and other information and about four hours later we had a response.

The suggestions were for blood work, to treat the possibility of a weird kind of intestinal worm and to treat for Irritable Bowel Disease. Well we had a vet's appointment on the 9th so we decided to start treating him for the IBD, something we could do and we knew wouldn't hurt him. No dry food, yogurt with every meal, and make him walk after each meal. Withing two days there was a major change. No heavy breathing, sleeping through out the night, and no throw up.

Good lord, why do you wonder wasn't our vet able to suggest that this might be a problem and to suggest a simply change in diet to treat him?