I’ve had the most horrendous night with a 3am vet visit and my darling BigDog going into emergency surgery a couple of hours later. If I’d waited til morning I probably would have come down to find him collapsed and in organ failure or worse. He’s come through surgery well though not out of the woods yet, but I wanted to write down my experience with bloat in case it helps another dog in the future.
As the owner of a large breed I was aware of bloat (GDV), a condition where the stomach twists and gas builds up, causing it to inflate like a balloon. If it twists round far enough it stops blood circulation to the organs, and the increased stomach size puts pressure on the heart, diaphragm and other organs.
Dogs with deep, narrow chests are most at risk. Other factors include feeding one large meal a day, anxiety and stress, raised food bowls and exercising too close to eating.
Yesterday we had a very chilled day. We went to obedience training in the morning, came back for a cup of tea and some lunch, a fairly sedate walk in the woods mid-afternoon then a relaxed evening. He was his normal self, ate his dinner, scored a couple of leftover roasties from mine and we went to bed.
At 1 am I heard a retching noise, and went down expecting to clear up a BigDog-sized puddle of sick. But I couldn’t find any. I took him out in the garden since I was down anyway, where he toileted as normal then trotted back inside. I spent 10 mins downstairs with him, he went back to sleep so I went off to bed. At 2am, I hear the same noise again. Went down, he jumps up, wags his tail at me then settles back down. I’m still not overly concerned, the retching is odd but all the lists of bloat symptoms put anxiety and restlessness at the top and he had neither. He didn’t seem in any distress at all. So back to bed. Half an hour later it’s now 2.45 and he does it again. I go downstairs and he’s more lethargic. Starting to really worry, I stand him up and think that his stomach does now feel slightly distended (but still nowhere like the barrel-shape dogs you see pictures of). I was sufficiently worried to wake the on-call vet up and head into the surgery. On examination she didn’t seem hugely concerned (he dragged me into the surgery and certainly didn’t seem that sick), but X-rays showed a dilated stomach and attempts at clearing it with a tube while he was conscious failed.
They admitted him for anaesthetic and were able to get the tube into his stomach, releasing the gas and improving his vital signs. But without surgery to stitch the stomach in place, the chances of it twisting again are high. Operating on a dog whose organs have been under strain is relatively risky, but we really didn’t have much choice. Surgery found that his stomach had twisted 180degrees.
He’s now awake and on his feet, not out of the woods but doing as well as can be hoped. Having had this once the risk now is that it can come back at any time and the surgery to prevent the stomach from twisting isn’t 100% effective.
I am mostly in shock that my young, healthy dog with no risk factors other than his breed (and he’s not a Great Dane or one of the really high risk breeds) suffered it out of the blue.
I also wanted to highlight that it doesn’t matter if they don’t have all the symptoms (bloating, restlessness, anxiety, drooling, unproductive vomiting, looking at their stomach, shock/collapse in later stages). It really is an emergency, and I am SO grateful to the vet and nurse who got out of bed and came to work in the middle of the night and operated there and then to give him the best chance of surviving this.