Wednesday, November 30, 2011
A Saga of Benjamin Proportions
Well, I always like to preface a long blog with the following: pull up a chair; it’s going to be a doozy. It’s going to be a long story (even though I am trying to make is short).
Before leaving for vacation, Benjamin was experiencing what I considered to be allergies. He had been licking his feet, scratching his ears and rubbing his face into the back of the sofa. We had noticed that one of his lower eyelids was a little droopy and that one of his jowls was a bit puffy and hanging lower than the jowl on the other side of his face. We didn’t think that much about it as initially we thought the face swelling had to do with his dental issue that we tended to before we left on vacation. Then, while in the mountains of North Carolina, Benjamin did not experience any of these things. This furthered my suspicion that Benny has allergies. This suspicion was even greater after we arrived home and his eyes got all goopy and he started squinting. He also had swollen wrinkles, and that eye droop was back. He was in such rough shape that I had to take him to the vet. The vet noticed not one but two ulcers on his corneas. (One on each cornea, that is.) The vet gave us some drops and said to come back in a week if he hadn’t improved; and stressed that if he was worse that could be indicative of a more severe problem.
Benny was better in a week. No worries. Well, about another week the later, the same symptoms start cropping up again. This time, since I already have a trip to the eye specialist for Luna planned, I call and ask if I can tack Benjamin on to the appointment so we can get a better idea of what is going on with him. “Of course,” they share. So, I tote both Benjamin & Luna to the eye specialist (which, as you know is no small jaunt; it’s about 50 miles away).
So, there we are at the eye vet with Benny. He has an ulcer in his left eye. They are of the mind that it is self inflicted. They ask the questions which demonstrate my poor supervisory skills:
- Has he been scratching his face? (Duh, yeah)
- Has he been running his face into the carpet or into furniture to scratch? (Um, of course)
Then embarrassingly, I try to conceal his mile long toe nails on top of it all….
So, the eye specialist loads him up with a variety of drops (3 different ones) and a gel (just one). Shortly after that, though, comes the icing on the cake: the cone! (I guess, I should have said the ice cream came next because the cone would make more sense to go with ice cream than cake.) Well, Benny can barely make it around the house and neighborhood coneless let alone wearing a satellite dish around his neck. Good grief.
Yet, home we go with Benny, the coned dog, and Luna who is just happy as a peach not be the wearer of the cone.
Oh, holy cow. I almost forgot one of the best parts…Benjamin has to go back the next day for a follow up! Really? Hate to sound like a whiney baby that won’t do anything for their kids, but we did just get back from vacation so I have taken a bit of time off work lately…and now I need to take back to back trips to the vet where each round trip is at least 3 hours? Aw geez.
In the meantime, Benjamin had another appointment that afternoon with our regular vet about the droopy/swollen face issue. The eye specialist could not see any link to the squinty/goopy eye to the other maladies. I had updated our primary vet on the status of Benny and shared what the eye vet had to say. After some consideration and an exam, the primary vet, told me to ask the eye vet if she would consider a condition called Horner's Syndrome. Horner's Syndrome is not a disease it is more like a combination of symptoms that when linked together can be indicative of a number of diseases/conditions. So, the most simple is no known cause, to relatively simple such as a middle ear infection or severely problematic of chest or brain tumors.
With that philosophy, the primary vet attempts to examine Ben's ears. Well, lovely, they are filled with impacted fur. So, now this is even more where the "I'm a bad mom" guilt sets in. His ears are filthy. So filthy actually that he needs to be mildly sedated to have them cleaned. So, the ear cleaning is scheduled, as well as a toe nail clipping and a head/chest X-ray.
Here is my promise for the future:
I will be a better mom about cutting his toenails (even though they grow twice as fast as Luna’s & Henry’s); I will be sure he wears the cone when needed so as not have him scratch his face so much that he puts an eye out (for you "Christmas Story" fans, that should raise a giggle) and I will be sure to stay on top of his ear cleaning (even though he is by far the worst at this task---as the primary vet put it during the exam when speaking to Ben, he said, "Boy, you strong. Like bull.")
