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.