Dogs

Nico and Sofi are doing great. The dogs... not so much...

Let's start with Tasha... Tasha, who is 9 years old now... and whenever she has a health issue all I can think about is those (horrible) people that, when we first got her as a puppy, would say things like: "Oh, what a cute Boxer puppy. You know that Boxers only live 8 to 9 years, right?" About a month ago Tasha woke up one morning with her left eye barely open and all goopy and oozy. It didn't seem to be bothering her, so I made an appointment for the next week (this was on a Friday) to have it checked. It's never a good sign when the doctor walks into the exam room, and says "Oh! We need to do something to that eye today!" She had an eye ulcer and they kept her to be able to take care of it. And since she was going to be under, they were also going to remove a tag that she had in her eyelid and two bumps that she's had on her back for a while - they have been "on watch" for a few years, but they hadn't changed much and the doctor wasn't worried.

After the surgery, they sent one of the masses out for tests (it looked suspicious), but results came back and everything was benign. So that was a big sigh of relief. After surgery they sent her home with her eye stitched shut so it would heal. When we went back a week later for check up the doctor decided she could use more time to heal, so they put her under again so that they could patch her eye again. Of course two days later, after being great for 10 days about leaving the whole thing alone, Tasha pawed at her eye and removed the patch completely. Fortunately she didn't cause any damage, and after another re-check the vet thought she'd be fine without a patch. It's been three weeks since surgery, and even though her eye still looks super creepy, it is on the mend and we expect she'll make a fine recovery.

And then there's Eco, my problem child. For those of you that don't know, Eco has had an ear issue for over a year now. He had a tag or something on the tip of his ear that just wouldn't heal - it would scab over, he would shake (very vigorously), the scab would come off, there would be blood everywhere, and the whole process would start all over again. With the vets we have tried a bunch of different things, but nothing seemed to work long enough for the ear to heal. Finally, the morning that we were supposed to take Tasha in for her first appointment we woke up again to blood drops all over the carpet downstairs. So we took him in with Tasha that morning, and after talking to the vet, decided to just trim his ear to take off the portion that wasn't healing.

Always a cuddle bug.

Unfortunately his recovery hasn't been as easy as Tasha's. At the one-week check up we finally got to see the "new"ear - it basically looks like a bat ear that half stands up :) However, because of how much he had been rubbing on the bandage, the stitches were healing very well, so the vet recommended we keep the ear bandaged for another week. About three days later, he was scratching at the bandage so hard that he was starting to hurt his other ear that hadn't been taped down. I immediately wrapped up his whole head (see above) and we made it to the next check up, after which they sent him home all bandaged up again.

Last Friday morning I was getting ready for work and notice he was scratching a lot. When I glanced again I saw blood on him again. Sigh... Because he has his dewclaws he had scratched so much that he had given himself a cut right by his eye. At that point I gave up on trying to keep him from scratching and he got the cone of shame.

With the cone of shame

He is miserable and has lost a bunch of weight since this whole ordeal started, but hopefully when it's all over we'll be able to forget about the drama and it'll be a story that we occasionally remember. We'll see. I have to check-in with the vet tomorrow to find out when he gets another check up.

Yay, life with (our) dogs!