Spider Bites and Steroids

[ShannonO]

I'm not sure that General is the right place for this thread, but it didn't seem to fit anywhere else either.

Sage got a BAD reaction to a spider bite a few days ago. I remember him springing backwards on a walk and I'm betting that's when it happened. In the next couple of hours he had bumps ALL over his body. When I inspected a bump he flinched. This dog NEVER flinches; his pain and annoyance tolerance is really high.

I took him to the vet and they gave a shot of steroids and a shot of antihistamines. The vet asked me to wait for 20 min so she could see the bumps go away. 40 minutes later they slowly started to recede.

Because the bumps didn't disappear as quickly as she had wanted, the vet prescribed steroid pills to continue over five days.

Does this seem a little extreme? It's two days later and the bumps are completely gone, but the after effects of these meds are horrible. He's incredibly thirsty, and as a result needs to pee every three hours. I didn't realize it was as bad as it was until the poor poor baby sat next to me and started to piddle. I found little drips around the kitchen where he had obviously tried to keep it in. Poor Sage! I didn't notice his feeble signs to go out because A) he rarely asks to go outside, we always preemptively walk him and B) i think he was lethargic from the benadryl that he was still on.

So here's the big question: would you keep him on the steroids? How often do you challenge your vet's diagnoses or courses of treatment? I have left a message in to ask whether I can stop the steroids early, but I'm curious about the opinons of this board in this situation.