Oh Jonesy

Well I've had an interesting last several days with my dog. After his trip to the dog park last Friday, he had stepped on a cactus and spend several hours taking the needles out of his paws. Apparently though, that was not his only mishap for this particular trip. The park we visited was a big open space park with lots of different kinds of weeds growing. At one point, I noticed his face was green with pollen from running through the growth, but as we'd been to this park numerous times before, I wasn't worried.

Jonesy has known food allergies, he reacts strongly to chicken: as in he breaks out in hives all over his belly and occasionally inside his ears. He has a milder reaction to turkey: his belly gets a milder form of the rash when he's had a fair amount of turkey. What he has never had before though was an environmental allergic reaction.

On Saturday night, he broke into a pretty violent sneezing fit, one so strong I'd never seen him sneeze that hard before and I was semi-concerned. This was around his normal dinnertime, so I went ahead and fed him before I checked him over for any abnormal signs. He started to shake his head a bit during this time, so I looked inside his ears and spotted what looked to be a couple of small hives. I gave him benadryl and let him go on his merry way.

A short time later, I noticed he was pretty vigorously shaking his head, so I got a flashlight to thoroughly check out his ears. It was when I lifted up his left ear that I noticed it felt oddly heavy and was swollen. This was a new symptom that he had never had before, but I knew from working at a dog daycare in the past that floppy eared dogs could get hematomas (a build-up of blood and fluid in the ear flaps) and thought maybe that was what he had the beginnings of from shaking his head.

Note the swollen ear.

Since it was a weekend and I didn't think it was an emergency, I opted to just observe him because 6 months ago we had a very expensive Sunday vet visit when he impaled himself on a branch. He seemed fine other than twitching his ears and slight swelling on Sunday, so I went to work and tried not to be too worried. When I came home from work, his left ear was noticeably more swollen, so I figured Monday morning we'd make a trip to the vet (see above photo).

Of course, on Monday morning, the ear was back down to normal, so I decided we'd just see if this was the end of the episode. As I'm sure you might guess, this was not the end of it. Late Monday night, I let him out to the bathroom and when he came back inside, he frantically started rubbing his nose on the furniture. I noticed what looked two scratches and thought maybe he'd managed to snag his nose on the fence or something.

See? Just looks like little scratches.

Now Tuesday morning, when I came home, he had spent the morning apparently rubbing at his nose with his paws because there were two larger wounds. At this point, I figured the nose and earlier swollen ears were not unconnected so we paid our veterinarian a visit. I strongly suspected this was all related to an allergic reaction, but at this point we needed some help getting things under control that the benadryl just wasn't helping.

At the vet they listened to my description of everything and agreed that it seemed most likely to be from an allergic reaction. They took a sample of the blood oozing out of his snout wounds and checked under a microscope to make sure there were no signs of infection. His temperature read normal and he had not lost any appetite or thirst, so with no signs of anything other than a bad allergic reaction we got some steroids, antibiotics (to prevent infection) and an e-collar (aka cone of shame) to keep him from scratching his nose any farther.

"I'm just going to stare at you until you take this thing off!"

At home, I adjusted the cone of shame to fit and Jonesy initially had a really hard time getting around. He'd never had an e-collar on before as he was neutered by the shelter at (a way too young!) 8 weeks old and his neck injury in February was in a spot where a cone would do no good. As expected, he kept smashing into things with the cone and when he got caught up on something, he'd just stand there and look pitiful. Prior to getting the cone put on, he had been feeling fine, so I think he was just trying to drum up sympathy and have someone take pity on him and remove the cone of shame.

Ouch, so swollen. :(

Come dinnertime, I decided to take the cone off since I'd be supervising him and I wanted to ease the attempt to eat a meal and get a good drink of water. He ate his food and almost instantly started pawing at his nose, so the cone went right back on. He did figure out that he could still get a drink of water with the cone on, so I was less concerned. This, however is not the end of the saga.

This morning, around 3AM, he woke me up wanting to go outside, I assumed to use the bathroom. After several minutes though, I heard his cone smacking repeatedly into something, so I called him and he popped out of the bushes and came back to bed. When I got up this morning, I noticed that the wounds had gotten bigger and this was when I realized he'd found a way to scratch his nose without the use of his paws.

Branches = Great Scratchers!

 So for the next couple days, he's going to have to have supervised trips outside to go to the bathroom. Once the nose heals up some, he'll be able to spend more time outside, but as of right now, I don't want him getting caught up on branches or the fence with the e-collar anyway. Poor Jonesy, this mutt's had more health issues than any of the purebreds we had growing up.

You made it worse with the branches.