On the night of July 4th, I heard someone throwing up. I came into the hallway, and there was Luigi standing over his mess looking dazed. His whole dinner was on the floor. I cleaned it up, and went back to sleep.

He wasn’t looking too well the night of July 5th, but he was eating fine, so we went to sleep. In the morning, he looked dazed still, so I did some acupressure (click here and scroll down to see how it’s done) on him to rev up his bowels. We’d had a peanut hunt on July 4th, which is nothing new, but I wondered if he’d had a blockage by possibly having ate a rock. I had hoped he was smarter than that, though, as he’d never swallowed a rock before even in his zealousness on the peanut hunt days. Did he find too many peanuts and was blocked by the shells? Nah. But I hadn’t noticed any doo-dee from him in a day, so all these thoughts were circulating in my head.

After the acupressure, I was relieved, though a little overtaken, by the voluminous amount of gas he was passing. Wooo doggie! When we went to the back door to go outside, I’d found he’d thrown up his dinner again. Wow. I cleaned it up and we went outside, and I kept an eye on him for signs of doo-dee making. It didn’t take long, as the acupressure kicked in, and there he was, with a puddle of doo-dee. Thank goodness he did it on the rocky soil, so I took the hose and took care of it.

So his back end was opened Yippie! But it was really loose. I searched my mind for some help with fixing his diarrhea and puking by holistic and natural ways. I had tried canned pumpkin before, but that wasn’t as good a fix as I’d thought it would be. Then a recording of Dr. Marty, who airs on channel 112 (Martha Stewart’s vet) Sirius radio, played in my head. He’d given a recipe out for fixing diarrhea many times on the radio, and for once, my memory grasped and retained new information. (It gets harder to do such things as one matures as the wine bottles on the shelf.)

Though I didn’t recollect his mentioning that the recipe would fix the puking aspect, I was going to try it. Luigi hadn’t kept down a dinner in two nights, and I couldn’t figure out why. Then it dawned on me. Though he is Mr. Cool, the Big Luigi, the steady state and pack leader on the Doberboy side of things, he had been upset by the fireworks this year. On July 4th night, when we stepped out for a potty break, the air was like foggy London town. And horrid to breathe. At one point, there was a set of squiggly air fireworks that were blasting and squiggling for so long, that I even wished they’d stop already because it was just overwhelming. At the end of that ostentatious display, I looked around me and found only three of the FDSP outside with me. The rest ran back into the house.

Ollie was the Dober representing the boy side of the pack. He is pretty much as laid-back as they come unless it has to do with going to obedience class where he acts up like an uneducated dawg. Ollie is known as the DoberDivo because he is the second Dober who joined the FDSP, and was trained in Diva/Divo aspects by the Queen Mother Diva Superior herself, Baby. However, she has not gotten through to him that Divos are supposed to be coy and ‘fraid of big bangs. Well, so he’s only part Divo, then.

Leissl was the Dober representing the lady side of the pack. She’s the movie star and a very steady personality with most things. She can focus unless there is something in the distance which requires her to be a vigilant Dobermann. She is also a patroler of sorts. Some Dobies patrol to extremes, but Leissl has an equality about her patrolling. Not too much, except on occasions, do I have to tell her to stop it already. Toenails on the tile, click click click, no matter how I trim them. It’s hard to sleep with that clicking going on.

The third member of the FDSP in the midst of the fireworks extravaganza was not an Aussie. She is the one Dober I would never have thought in a million years is as steady under sound and stink distraction as she is because she is also a DoberDiva. The third member is Miss Lilian! She stayed out in the back yard as if it were a lovely spring evening and she was sniffing the magnolia blossoms instead of getting a snout full of noxious fireworks gasses while being bombarded with booms, bangs, and katoons!

Surprise surprise surprise, though she is a patriotic little rascal, when it came to extreme fireworks – no Raven.

Thinking back to that moment reminded me that Luigi was no where to be found. He can take a certain amount of the fireworks, but that extreme moment shook his spirit enough to cause a lot of stress. I had given the usual ones who have trouble with thunder and sounds a good dose of Rescue Remedy prior to the night’s festivities – Baby, Regis, Ginger, Bouchard and Taylor Bunny BunBun. And I did it again on July 5th due to overzealous firework displayers. Luigi was not one of them. He will be in the future, though.

After putting all these pieces together, I found that Luigi was suffering from a bout of nerves that were jangled, and decided to try Dr. Marty’s Potato diet for Luigi to see if it would stay down and get his body back to normal.

These are the ingredients:

Equal parts of sweet potato and regular potato
(Luigi gets red potatoes due to less oxalates than brown ones and he’s a calcium oxalate boy)
A slice of turnip and a slice of leak
Boil in water till done.
Cool and serve.

Luigi watched as I cut up the ingredients and put them into the crock pot. He was especially enamored with the turnip, and probably would have grabbed it and ran with it given the chance. Hours later when his diet was cooked and cooled, he ate it and it stayed down. He had another serving for breakfast, and has enough leftover from the crockpot of the Potato Diet for dinner and maybe even breakfast tomorrow.

It’s another good thing presented through the Martha Stewart radio channel. It works! Thank you, Dr. Marty.

Helen