Dog has intermittent nausea/gut issues. Can’t figure out what’s wrong.

June 29, 2024 7:07 AM

Our dog has always had a sensitive stomach, since she was a puppy. It always exhibits the same way, and she’s had plenty of vet visits over it with no clear solution. Anyone have a similar experience?

You’re not our vet, of course.

Our 2.5 year old dog goes through the same cycle every couple of months, and sometimes every couple of weeks. Just starts refusing to eat her food, and then will throw up bile once or twice in a day. Seems like she usually gets sick in the mornings.

We can sometimes tempt her with other food after a while but she will often start to refuse that as well. She refused food and threw up yesterday morning, we fed her boiled chicken for dinner last night which she gladly ate, and now this morning she’s refusing that too and acting very nauseated.

Eventually she starts eating again, but will usually refuse to eat her normal food, and we’ve rotated through a ridiculous amount of kibble brands over her lifespan to date. Well find one that she seems to LOVE, until a few months later when this happens again and the cycle renews.

A few weeks ago we had another event and she ended up having bloody diarrhea. The vet ran a bunch of tests and found absolutely nothing, gave us a prescription for Hill’s Gastrointestinal Biome food, and that was great! Until she refused to eat that too a couple weeks later.

I’m kind of at a loss here. Everything else with her remains pretty much the same — she gets really sad and clingy when she’s feeling nauseated, but after vomiting, she isn’t lethargic, she wants to play and run outside, and she even seems like she’s hungry; she just won’t actually eat anything we offer.

Has anyone dealt with this before and solved it? Is there something it could be that we aren’t thinking of?

posted by caitcadieux to Pets & Animals (8 answers total)

Things your vet may or may not have ruled out: tooth pain. Acid reflux (either as the primary issue, or a follow-on issue with the not eating for a bit). The pattern of mornings being worse and vomiting bile are consistent with reflux. We've got a pup we think has this issue, but he's the rare dog who gets every side effect in the Merck veterinary manual for omeprazole, making his GI issues way worse. Like your pup, his symptoms are cyclical, so it's hard to evaluate how well a solution is working, but generically speaking (not sure about drug interactions, check with your vet, etc) dogs can take most human reflux meds at the right dosage. Reflux can be worse the longer your pup has an empty stomach, so the other thing we'll try to do if he's going through it is give him a decent sized snack right before bed if he'll eat it. Unsure if that does much for him, since it's not like he can rate his nausea on a scale for us every morning, but the principle is sound.

My sympathies, this kind of thing is exhausting. A side effect of all this at our house is that our intermittently pukey dude now refuses to eat his breakfast until he has received an excessive amount of pets. Dogs, man.
posted by deludingmyself at 7:20 AM on June 29 [1 favorite]

You might want to ask your vet about IBD. It can present cyclically and new foods can seem to solve things for a bit until they don’t. Hypoallergenic foods can help, but they can be spendy. It’s one of those diseases that can be managed, but not really cured, and takes some trial and error. But treatment can still give a good quality of life for a really long time - even letting the dog happily live their full expected lifespan.
posted by eekernohan at 7:23 AM on June 29 [3 favorites]

With a persistent pattern of on-and-off GI issues, you should test for Addison's disease. It is called the great pretender because symptoms can wax and wane and be non-specific.
posted by dum spiro spero at 9:22 AM on June 29 [1 favorite]

When this was happening to my dog (morning biley vomiting) I spent hundreds of dollars trying to figure it out, and the solution was just… feed half the dinner at the normal time and half at 9 or 10. Going that long on an empty stomach was causing him to vomit, for whatever reason. Worth a shot for a week or two.
posted by rhymedirective at 10:24 AM on June 29 [3 favorites]

Same split meal program as rhymedirective- we do half portions of chicken, rice and often carrot. We just boil it all up once a week and use a food processor to blend it up.
posted by zenon at 1:56 PM on June 29

Response by poster: Thank you all. Rhymedirective / zenon , we’ve tried this without any success, unfortunately. And I’m out of town today but my husband is taking her to emergency vet for more vomiting. I do suspect a food allergy or IBD is at play so we’ll be flagging that.
posted by caitcadieux at 5:40 AM on June 30

I can't remember where I read this - but some dogs can't go for very long periods without food. My first dog, lived to be 15, ate one meal a day in the evening, no problems.
My second dog had symptoms like yours and I read some dogs can't go all night (basically intermittent fasting) so I gave my new pup smallish meals every six hours. Even if I had to wake him up. This worked for us.
He can't eat a large meal (over one cup) or he will throw up.
I feed him about a third of a cup, four times a day.
I took him off all kibble because he hates it.
I homecook his meals which are mainly beef, chicken, or fish.
posted by cda at 8:36 AM on July 1

IBD is what that turned out to be in our dog, and she currently manages it with daily metronidazole and several-times-weekly budesonide plus special food, under the supervision of a GI specialist vet. She was 14 before having a truly severe episode, but has always had a few days here and there just being "yarpy" and low/no appetite. We, too, had spoken to multiple vets about it and they basically just shrugged, though the suggestion of breaking her meals up into several smaller ones throughout the day has been helpful. More than anything, though, getting a GI specialist involved has been worth it.

One thing I wanted to share was that when our dog did have her aforementioned "truly severe episode," it was after several days of increasingly diminished appetite and then a fountain of diarrhea, the combination of which landed her in the emergency vet for multiple days. Turns out she had contracted giardia on top of IBD (this is how we discovered she had IBD in the first place). We had grown so accustomed to her just having periods of not wanting to eat, and so used to vets not having much to say about it, that we didn't spot that something was different this time until it VERY much was and we came VERY close to losing her. It was awful (she's doing great now), and while I don't want to scare you I do want to encourage you to keep being vigilant about periods where your pup doesn't eat, and talk to your vet so you know in advance what signs suggest a trip to the emergency vet is in order (sounds like your husband took her in already so maybe this is more support/validation of that choice than advice you aren't already acting upon; either way, I hope she's okay!).
posted by DingoMutt at 11:19 AM on July 1