I can't do this to my children....

[Solo2]

I can't do this anymore. We are due to go on hol for our only break of the yr tomorrow and Rollo - our golden retriever puppy - aged 5 months - has had me up since 2am - with diarrhoea yet again.

If you've followed my other threads, you'll know that he's had this on and off for 3 to 4 weeks - recovering and then getting it again.

He's now on an expensive vet diet for hypersensitive tummies. He's had several courses of antibiotics and various other meds for tummies. He's been totally, totally fine for a week now. His poo samples came back as fine and I've been happy to pay hundreds of pound on vet fees.

He is due to be picked up by his trainer at noon today and she was going to have him whilst we were away. I am happy to pay her £350 as she was going to have him in her home and I trust her to care for him well. She has been monitoring his health of course as she can't be expected to have him if he's ill. She has 2 dogs of her own and for the next 4 days is also looking after someone else's dog. Rollo is fine with all these dogs and we were on course for our holiday.

I REALLY need a break from Rollo. I REALLY need some sleep and I REALLY need my DCs to have a holiday. Now it looks like we may not be able to go.

How am I going to tell the DCs? They've been looking forward to this hol all yr although it's only a UK cottage hol. We've never been abroad and this one week a yr is everything for them.

What am I going to do? I know this is coming from a lack of sleep (never had more than 6 hrs a night on the best night since Rollo joined us in March and obviously virtually none at all for nights and days on end when Rollo has been ill). Bu tI keep getting drastic ideas in my mind about getting rid of Rollo and really cannot go on like this. If it were just me, I'd cope. But my first loyalty and responsibility has to - and does - lie with my DCs and it's not just about this holiday.

We have had no fun from the puppy, as a family. I am totally sleep deprived and desperate. I am juggling puppy and DCs and running a fulltime business singlehandedly (no relaitves or partner around, so I do it ALL alone).

Please help me to think straight. My only thought is that I'll have to get the vets to see Rollo this morning and although I don't want to tell the trainer about what's happened, I'll have to and then it's possible our holiday is cancelled.

Are there any other options? I am having rather crazy ideas right now about rehoming Rollo today or even worse. He is a lovely puppy and for those familiar with dogs, he is apparently fairly easy going and lovely natured. He needs someone who has no other committments and can stay up all night with him and love him and be there for him.

I don't think I can be that person for him.

Solo, this might sound really daft, but have you had the water supply to your house tested?

you've got 2 dc and a cat with stomach problems and now a dog too - seems like too much of a coincidence to me

Can I just point out to PGTip, and to bandwithering that although the breeder has a moral obligation to take back the pup many won't do so, particularly if the dog is a vet bill on legs.

Which leaves rescue... and in all the years I've been rescuing I've yet to find any which would be falling over themselves to take on a sick pup with an unconfirmed condition who may well need meds for life and almost certainly seems now, if a raw/additive free diet doesn't work, to need to see a specialist vet.

What options does that leave Solo?

I would love for rollo to come here for a two week trial of raw diet. However dh would go balisticm

When we swityched the boys to raw we had a couple of days of explosive diahaorrea with one dog up 4times a night.

Then it stopped. They learnt to chew again oinmstead of hoiking it down in one go.

The thought of feeding dogs bones fill people with shock as we get told over and over its bad. Vets don't always agree as they also sell food in the surgeries :s.

But raw chicken bones don't slinter. They aren't brittle until cooked.

Are you absolutely sure that he isn't eating anything he shouldn't be?

Our dog has a sensitive tummy, and day to day it is fine as long as he sticks to his normal diet & chicken etc.

We have to make sure that girls don't feed him anything, or it upsets him. We get the yellow loose stools & vomit too. He also eats the mushrooms that we sometimes get in the garden, so have to watch out for them & remove them asap as they emerge.

I have also heard that prescription diets do more harm than good.

Being really stupid by can u tell me more about raw feeding? Cook my two mince or fish each night, but worry it's too boring, feel really silly asking but do you just give raw chicken etc?

Just a quick note as on my lunch break, will come back later and answer any questions you may have.
Our pup, now 11 mths, had the runs for ages when she was 5mths and we did all the tests, tried different foods then the vet recommended Chappie biscuit food and she has be fine since then, she has runny stools if she has too much 'human food' (rice, chicken, meat) but will be back to normal next time she goes.
Hope you can get something sorted because I know how hard it is xx

oh yes, my dsis vet recommended chappie as a cheaper alternative to the vet food but wasnt ideal long term as her boy was a pup.

raw feeding fab. just get chicken carcasses from the butchers, or anymeat thats reduced at the supermarket, or chicken wings. feed twice a day. add in some fruit + veg (ralphie eats apples, a cfew segments of ornages, cucumber, carrots, parsnips) i also give hi ma bit of cheese at times, and raw egg once a week. he likes liver once a month, chicken carcasses, wings, ribs, legs. basically anything. add a bit of olive oil/flax seed oil every now and then as well. also bio yoghurt.

just give what you can get.

works out a heck of a lot cheaper than shop bought food.

he has around 600g of food a day, worked out by eye these days. if he starts to look a bit porky then cut it down a bit, a bit too lean then biuld it up a bit.

also have been recommended this company as a good way of getting everything dog needs darlings

Our dog when I was small had this problem too, he was even at one point diagnosed as being a 'vegeterian dog' meaning he had problems with meat With a lot of searching and hard work we found that what really worked for him was to keep him on the vet food but everytime the stomach upset made an appearance to feed exclusivly on white fish and rice. He also only ever had cheap bottled water.

As BumpyBecky has suggested could it be your water supply? If all of you are having stomach problems then it could easily be something you're all ingesting and in a small pup with a more delicate stomach it could easily prove more problematic for him.

The only other thing is as missdee says try him on the raw food diet its what dogs are meant to eat and how they survived perfectly well for years before us.

Solo keep on at it with the different foods. Have you asked about allergey tests? If it is an intolerance causing it, it is possibly to something very common in dog foods.

Raw feeding is great for helping with loads of problems and he won't choke on the bones.

I would be more than willing to look after him while you holiday, for free, if you could get him to me (Teesside, NE). I have IBS cat, so I am well used to scooping up liquid shit from my floors and monitoring food intake and I have been homechecked, you can contact the rescue I foster with if you want to.

missdee I'd love to try the raw food diet but I'm not sure on how Charlie would react to it, I know he'd love the food he does occasionally get a raw egg/liver/bananas from us but hes about 7/8 we think he was a private rescue so not entirely sure as the poor thing had been passed about so much he's also a JRT you seem to have experiance with it and would love your advice on trying it out for him I know its beneficial but just not sure on trying it on an older dog rather than a pup.

Sorry to hijack your thread OP.

:) @ Dooin. How about that? Offers from both ends of England! :)

I really shouldn't be posting this as I have no dog experience whatsoever so will probably make you worry more, but if you are anywhere near Cambs and need a back up for the trainer, I would be more than happy to (for free of course, you are paying out enough as it is!). I have very experienced dog-owner friends that I could call if there were any issues that worried me, and our garden REALLY needs some good nutrients in it!

I've had a quick google and the drinking water inspectorate seem to be the regulator for water supplies, their page for consumers with problems is here..

drinking water inspectorate

queenie try it and see.

get yourself a copy of 'raw meaty bones', have a look through the darlings site (but dont worder from there unless you really cant handle handling raw meat, i'm not squeamish about portioning up meats as worked on the butcher counter years ago at safeway when they needed help), and work out how much he needs based on weight (dogs over 11kg need around 2% of their body weight of food a day). then find a good feeding area (ours is the garden) and go for it!

ralph loves bananas as well but he gets a bit of a sugar rush and goes a bit loopy.

solo, i'm sorry for the massive hijack.

you have some lovely offers from dooin etc and back up for the trainer, and i really hope you get on your holidays and rollos tum settles down.

Solo, don't panic. If I remember correctly, Rollo is over the age where puppies deteriorate quickly if they get ill, so although it seems like the end of the world when he's ill again in the middle of the night, if he's reasonably ok in himself don't stress out about him too much. After a year of dealing with a dog's digestive curiosities (thankfully not as bad as R's), you do get to a point where you accept that dogs just shit, sometimes it's fine, and sometimes it's grim .

I think the first priority is to get you and your DCs on holiday some how. This will seem much less stressful if you can come back rested and having had some decent sleep. Be completely open with the trainer - if she knows the dog, and has had several of her own, to be honest I doubt she's as phased by it as you naturally are, it being your own, first, young pup. If she can take him, then great, leave him with the meds, food, and vets phone number, and just go. Have a word with the vets about her taking him in if he deteriorates while you're away so you know there's a back-up plan that doesn't involve you dashing home suddenly. Let her handle it how she wants in terms of crating/containing him - I suspect a break in routine might actually help him re. going through the night in a crate, especially if there are other settled dogs around him.

To be brutal, even if he still has recurrent diarrhea he will be much easier for you to cope with if you can go to bed at night knowing the worst you'll have to contend with is hosing out the back garden after the first morning poo.

Then when you're back you can start thinking about a long term solution. I would make the vets be much much clearer with you about exactly what they are testing for - these blood and stool sample tests are expensive, so you need to know exactly what they're covering. If you don't feel your vets are really on board, then look around for another surgery to get a second opinion. One thing that concerns me is for them to be saying at such an early stage that he may need to be on lifelong meds - ours is very much more of the strategy that there is a problem here that can be solved, that his gut is still maturing, and we will beat it eventually!

Make sure your pet insurance has 'life' cover, so recurring problems/illnesses are covered. If you need to change, then change.

There is loads and loads of advice on here about feeding - some of it is obviously conflicting, just as with kids . Give him a couple of weeks on the hypoallergenic food, then be honest about whether there is an improvement, and then maybe is the time to start looking at options.

Oh and keep the faith! You will end up with a lovely dog you and your DC can enjoy, even it if involves a bit more bleach than you previously anticipated !

Hi Solo, I hope you get to go on your holiday you really sound like you need the break. I'm sure he will be fine with the trainer. I just wanted to add support for raw feeding. So easy and I couldn't believe how cheap it worked out in comparrison to the Natures Diet I was feeding. Don't worry about the bones, the first time I fed chicken bones I was hovering around the dog so close I was practically in the crate with him but he was fine! Vets get commision for the "specialist" food that they push on you and tell you it will be a life long problem which the food never seems to fully sort out...convincing you that your dog still needs it.

That Royal Canin stuff sounds pretty awful - tapioca?! It also has vegetable fibres right up there in the ingredients list, I feed cooked vegetables to my dogs if they need to be a bit looser!

Diet is the one thing I won't take a vet's advice on, I have a great amount of respect for their knowledge in all other spheres but I think they are spoonfed information about these kind of overprocessed, unnatural diets and then get tied in to marketing the big brands to make money for the practice. It used to be the case that some nutrition modules were actually sponsored by feed companies, I don't know if that's still true.

One of my dogs is intolerant of pretty much everything, she saw the vet four or five times with no improvement in the relentless diarrhoea. She was prescribed a Purina gastro-intestinal diet based on maize and rice - two things she later proved to be allergic to. I fed her on that for three days before I cracked, having been up four or five times a night to take her out and realising that this was not normal and was not improving with the vet's treatment.

All of them are now on a raw diet, probably 60% of which is raw chicken on the bone (raw bones don't splinter, cooked ones of any variety do). While we're away at rallies I need a dry kibble so they have Fish4Dogs which the squitty bitch can tolerate (but by god even though they're still solid their poos are three times the size on the kibble! ).

It's the case now that if squittybitch picks up a discarded sandwich or whatever she doesn't react to it (unless it's a really huge amount) - I think once their gut flora has recovered they can cope with small amounts of disruption, it's just when their system is overwhelmed constantly and all the good bacteria have died off that everything just goes straight through. This is for intolerances rather than allergies, mind.

"We have a dog and don't take him anywhere" - that's really sad.

So sorry to hear about your poor pup and about you - you must be exhausted. You've had some really good advice - I'd endorse getting the water tested and please, please, please ditch the Royal Canin. We moved off kibble earlier this year after we fostered then adopted a greyhound with a very sensitive tum. Ironically, we were busy researching diets and looking up which freezer to buy when he had a really severe attack of colitis, and was very poorly. I swore then that not another piece of kibble was entering our house and felt terrible that in some way I'd contributed to his illness. We've moved him and the other two to a sort of raw cum home prepared diet and it's working brilliantly for all three dogs. Small, firm poos and they are all looking and feeling fantastic. Now that his tum has settled, he can cope with things like an occasional Greggs sausage roll - one of his favourite treats.

I'm normally a big cheerleader for vets but would agree with the others who say that this is one area where (in general) advice can be iffy, especially as they get commission for these dodgy diets.

Please make sure your vet are absolutely clear about what blood tests they've done. Make sure you've had camphylobacter and Giardia done.

Your trainer will probably be completely relaxed about having Rollo - most doggy folk quickly become very accomplished poo-moppers and you only have to see the board here to see how many conversations we have about poo!

Wishing you all the best.

What would I do without Mumsnet and this forum! Thank you v much for getting me through this dreadful day!

Here's an update. The trainer liaised with the vets and has already picked up Rollo. He's had no further tummy trouble since i dropped him off this mroning so this is the quickest it's cleared up - at least if he doesn't get it again tonight. He's happy and settled at her home and enjoying her dogs' company.

The vet has put him on 2 meds but I'm not sure what and he's also now ONLY on the dry kibble tapioca and whitefish and no longer on the wet chicken and rice aswell. So not really what everyone here has recommended.

I am too exhausted to do anything further for now but will rethink the whole diet thing once we return from our hol. as it does like like we're going now! It makes common sense to think that a raw diet would be massively better than processed anything at all. If he stays settled on the dry kibble, I'll be much too nervous to change anything for a while, however.

I am desperately releived to be dog free for today and intend to go to bed early tonight and sleep in past 5am for the first time since we got Rollo in March. I also fee massively guilty about feeling relieved and worried that I'll not want him back but may feel differently after a break.

Many many thanks for all the kind offers of help and support. I'm closer to the south east than the northeast nowadays but a Geordie born and bred however. There may well come a time I could take people up on offers of RL support. For now, our trainer is being fantastic and says she doesn't mind mopping up poo and she'll ensure Rollo is very happy. She's keeping in regular contact by email.

Now I really need to get stuck into packing etc and turn my attention to the holiday! What a lovely lot you all are on here I so wish I'd known about Mumsnet when I had premature twins on my own. It really would have made a difference to those impossible years!

Enjoy your holiday solo :)

Hope rollo tum stays settled and you come back refreshed!

Hope you get a good nights sleep Solo. Enjoy your holiday.