AUBURN – It was a hot, mid-summer day when Rachel Duquette’s German shepherd Isaac got sick.

Duquette and her husband thought 9-year-old Isaac was just having a reaction to the heat. The large dog liked to run and play Frisbee, and they figured he had just overdone it.

But even though they kept him in the house and quiet, he kept throwing up. The next day he was worse.

Isaac’s legs were shaky. His stomach had swelled. His gums were white.

If her adult son – a medical student who interned at a veterinary clinic – hadn’t stopped by, Duquette said, Isaac would have died.

“My son says ‘Oh my god, he has bloat!'” Duquette said.

Bloat causes a dog’s stomach to twist and fill with air, painfully compressing major blood vessels and organs. The dog can easily go into shock and die.

Duquette rushed Isaac to the vet.

He immediately went in for surgery to untwist his stomach and anchor it. For a while, Duquette wasn’t sure whether Isaac, the dog she and her husband considered their baby, would survive.

Isaac spent the night in the hospital and went home a day later. For two weeks he quietly recuperated at home, unhappily eating only boiled chicken and rice, with no raucous games of Frisbee.

Four weeks after his ordeal, Isaac is back to normal.

Although Duquette had dogs before Isaac, she never knew about bloat. She now warns all her dog-owner friends about the deadly disorder.

“They never knew about it either,” she said.

Bloat is most common in large, deep-chested dogs, such as German shepherds, Great Danes and Saint Bernards. But Erich Baumann, a veterinarian at the Animal Emergency Clinic of Mid-Maine, has seen it in dogs as tiny as dachshunds.

Some experts believe bloat comes on after a dog wolfs down food or gulps water, and then runs around.

Vomiting is a sign of bloat. So is a bloated or hardened stomach, pacing and restlessness. Dogs sometimes roll around on the ground, eat grass and retch in an effort to relieve the pressure on their stomachs.

Some vets say owners can reduce the chances of bloat by raising their dog’s food and water dishes off the floor, by feeding two or three small meals a day instead of one large one and by ceasing exercise for a least an hour or two after the dog eats.

Duquette has done it all for Isaac and her other German shepherd, Sarah.

“We’re a little bit more cautious now,” she said.

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