I took my dog to the vet yesterday because he has skin ailments and now these big lumps on his neck and legs. I really worried they are something really serious. The stupid vet would never do anything before except give him a cortisone shot and say "we'll see what happens." He did that twice. Second time with my mom who didn't know that he should have done more. Now that he has these lumps and I find out that the skin symptoms were precursors to it and the vet didn't do anything...I'm going to freak out on him.
It is expensive. I'll pay for it because I love my dog. The vet actually suggested we don't do any allergy tests because he said it was costly. I said screw the costs this dog is part of my family and I am responsible for its well being.

When my wife ran over one of our cats, we used the care credit.

It helped.

Damn cat ended up running away anyway, $4,000 in bills later.

Do you guys not have pet insurance in America?

There is pet insurance available in America.

I'm not sure how expensive it is for dogs and cats. I do not have my dogs insured with health insurance.

I had the horse insured until he turned 15. Then they would not insure him anymore. Equine insurance is different than pet insurance.

My dogs get allergies where they are white. My vet told me yesterday we can use benedryl (as I too, was getting the shots). It's way cheaper too. For my 50 lb dog, she can get two caps....I am gonna try it.

It's available, but it's pretty rare to find someone who has it on their dog or cat. Most people I know have no idea it's an option.

There is pet insurance available here, but we don't have it. We also don't have human health insurance, or renter's insurance, or any other kind of insurance..

We had pet insurance for our dog for a time but it only covered emergency procedures and not routine checkups or minor problems. If some $5000 surgery is needed it would be nice but paying $20/mo is too steep a price to hedge against that eventuality. We just decided if the emergency surgery came up we'd pay for it, now we spend the $20/mo on other things, including better dog food.

K, I just wondered if it was just a Brit thing for some bizarre reason :)

We've got all our pets insured, we learnt our lesson the hard way. We got hit with a £1,000 vets bill just before christmas :(

Thing is, you still have to pay for it up front and then get reimbursed from the pet insurance place.

There is an emergency vet clinic here that will let an animal die if they don't have cash up front.

Didn't even matter that my friends K9 had bloat on Memorial weekend last yr. They had to hunt down someone from the sheriff office to pay 2500.00 before they would touch him.

Ain't that some crap!?!?

Drago

Yeh, my other half had to shop around a fair bit to get her brood mare insured, she's 17 (the brood mare not my wifey) She did manage to find a company who would though. It seems like all the mainstream insurers have a cut-off point of 15 for horses.

my first dog had a severe food allergy of some sort. she had major skin rashes, ear infections, and a slew of other problems. the vets had no idea what was going on and they kept recommending we feed her eukanuba and iams. anyway. she ended up getting cancer and dying. it was probably a wheat or corn allergy. iams and eukanuba have both. they're 1 star quality dog food. bad stuff.



try changing out your dog food.

you can compare all of the dog food brands here:



for everyone else. dog insurance through the ASPCA is cheappp. 7.50 for cats, 9.50 for dogs.
(just for the basic safety plans).

My vet put my female on Loratidine (same as Claritin) for awhile when her allergies were really bad. Lots of paw licking and chewing, and skin scratching and watery eyes.

I know several people that have their dogs on benedryl and they say it really helps. Much cheaper than shots.

I'm glad she found someone that would insure her. When he was insured before the age of 15 I was showing him alot, only reason I really had insurance on him, but there was a clause about his melanomas. Anything related to that would not have been covered. So, 3 yrs ago when I spent $3,000 in vets bills just for diagnosis, they would not have covered it anyway and 2 years before that I spent $1500 on laser surgery on his rectal melanomas, which wouldn't have been covered either. Equine Insurance is very tricky. You really have to read and understand the fine print. If your horse is in a life or death situation and you have it treated before the insurance company gives you the ok, they can deny your claim. They can also tell you to euthanize the horse instead of treating it. And if you file a "loss of use" claim if that's the type of insurance you bought, the insurance company then technically owns the horse. It happened to the racehorse Cigar when he went to stud. He fired blanks, he was insured for loss of use as a stud. The insurance company would then own him if they paid the claim out. I'm not sure whatever happened with that. It was big mess for awhile. I'll have to look it up on the net and see what the outcome was.

Did you actually find out what's wrong? How old is your dog and what breed is he?

He's a 7 year old ShihTzu. He started showing signs of some type of allergy a little over a year ago now. He started licking his feet non-stop and then he started getting really red blotchy skin. He's lost hair in places he's developed rashes. We took him to the vet and he gave him a cortisone shot and it helped but for only so long. I did research and like TraumaMama said we could give him benadryl. I figured we could keep giving him benadryl every time he would have symptoms but then he developed these bumps on his legs and neck. It freaked me out so I took him to the vet and had him do a biopsy. We'll find out in two weeks what the bumps are.
The vet was baffled because his white count was normal and he didn't have a fever. I'm freaked out. I'm really hoping all it is is a food allergy. Celiac disease or something. I've started him on the BARF diet. (raw meats and vegetables) I would really like to know what types of meat I should be giving him. There has to be some preference or something.

That seemed to help somewhat for my dog. I couldn't help but notice he was a little sedated so I'm really hoping we can put him on a diet of sorts so we don't have to keep giving him some.

[edit to add] This thread is very helpful. I don't know why I didn't start a forum earlier. You guys are very helpful. God knows I've looked at a billion websites trying to figure this out.

Atopy
Atopy would be my first guess, but I'm not sure about the lumps, depends what kind of lumps they are, could be unrelated.