Its all about perspective...

With the nice warmer weather comes every Minnesotans least favorite thing...Mosquitos.  As we were relaxing last night I was frantically scratching at a cluster of them on my arm and complaining about how itchy.

Really?  A few mosquito bites and most of us, myself included, turn into whining, scratching wimps!  Then there is Toad who I have to imagine itches about a thousand times worse and he isn't getting relief no matter how much he scratches.  Can you imagine that?  I don't even think I can fully grasp how horrible would be.

This is Toad's everyday life and has been for a long time.   This is a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week feeling.  I wonder if he even remembers a time where he wasn't itchy.

He has every reason in the world to be angry, upset, and to lash out but instead Toad is grateful for everything.  He is grateful every time his food bowl gets filled, for every snuggle, for every hug, for the smallest piece of treat, for a doggy friend to run with, for a ball to chase after and then be confused by.  He even is grateful for a bath or an ear cleaning because there maybe is a tiny bit of relief or at the very least its a lot of attention.

Toad has had a relapse of his skin infection over the past few days.  Instead of being on his chest its mostly along his back and on his legs.  We are not sure why or what is causing it since nothing has shown up on cultures, scrapes, and nothing has changed medication/food/etc wise but unfortunately he is definitely much worse than he was even 3 days ago.  His 1st surgery to remove the ear canal on his worse ear (the one that has reformed the scar tissue over the canal already) is still tentatively scheduled for this coming Friday but with the recent setback a lot depends on that.  If he continues to get worse or doesn't show improvement we will likely have to wait and try to get that under control first.

So...send some good thoughts to the little guy right now.  He's sitting on my lap as I post (he likes to drool on the keyboard) and he could sure use some good wishes

Ears!

Pictures have been LONG awaited, I know!

Here's his ears as of today...

Left Ear--that yellowy/greyish goop is what comes out of his ears constantly.  This picture is about 5 minutes after de-gooping.

Right Ear.  This is the worse one in terms of scar tissue.  They couldn't get much off at the time of his first surgery because of the blood loss.  The infection doesn't drain as much from this ear but that's mostly because it can't get out of the folds of the scar tissue.  Cleaning this ear can only be done with q-tips to get under the tissue and in the crevices. 

This is the gunk that comes out of Toad's ears at every de-gooping (meaning removing the goop from between the scar tissue, around the ear, tops of the ear, etc, etc). He gets his ears de-gooped twice a day before his ointments.  His ear cleanings (3x a week) usually get at least twice this much gunk out since we go deeper into the ear canals.  Toad's records is a whole roll of paper towels in one cleaning.  : )

Note: Cleaning a dog's ears (especially the ear canals) with q-tips is not recomended since you can easily push the infection deeper or puncture the ear drum.  The q-tips in Toad's case are used to clean the crevices in his scar tissue that nothing else can reach into.

And after that ear yuck and meds...TREATS!!!!  Which for any good bulldog means plenty of slobber. : )

 Toad will go back in to the vet this week.  Likely we will decide to do surgery on him.  He is not improving enough to continue as is.  Its not giving him enough relief or showing signs of working.  Even his skin this week seems to have backslid a bit (found a couple sores on his chest).  The inflammation in his ears from the first surgery is down but the infection, the itching, and the pain are still very severe. 

Its really hard to see him suffer like this. To see him stoicly allow us to clean his ears and de-goop them even though it itches and it hurts. To see him itch so badly that he loses control of his back legs scratching and shaking and hurts himself and me in the process of trying to stop.