Monday Mischief: Daisy’s Double Ears!

I always say there’s a silver lining to just about everything if you look for it….and we found the silver lining to Daisy’s ear allergies.

Daisy has a double coat, and her ears have thick layers of hair. After the oily allergy treatments in her ears, the hair was all separated and icky. We double-bathed her ear flaps with every bath, but still her hair never went back to the thick, flowing locks she had.

And then we realized why when, after one bath, her two ears turned into four….

Hey! Where’d these two extra ears come from?!

Upon closer examination, we discovered that those two “extra ears” were actually solid hair mats, and her tiny little ears were buried deep within them.

So out came the grooming trimmer, a safe way to trim away the excess with no risk of cutting her skin, and off came the extra “ears” in solid mats:

Any dog out there need extra ears???

And suddenly Daisy went from this:

What we thought were thick, lustrous ears….

To this:

The little face we can’t resist, now with little ears to match!

We’re keeping those little ears trimmed so there are no more double ear buildups! Who knew?!

We’re part of the Monday Mischief blog hop!

CONE FREE!

The Cone of Shame is GONE!! Finally!! Saturday Daisy had her follow-up vet visit and he was shocked at how much better her ears are. We can finally stop putting that disgusting oily medicine in her ears every night. We still have to finish up the pills over the next several weeks though.

What was our first order of business? GIVING HER A BATH!! This dirty dog hasn’t had a bath in THREE WEEKS because of her ear problem.

Here she is before the bath, all overgrown with oily ears.

Ugh. My fluffy ears are all flat! And I’m overgrown like a weed patch!

I mean, take a look at these things!

Now she’s fluffy again….EXCEPT on her ears. DD shampooed them and shampooed them, but it’s going to take several washings to get all that oil out of her hair. Her ear flaps still look stringy. Ugh.

With my hair overgrown and my ears trimmed but still greasy, I look out of balance – my head looks too small for my fluffy, overgrown body! I look like one of those “square sheep” in Americana paintings!

We switched to a hypoallergenic shampoo and are looking into making our own to eliminate all those chemicals.

But here’s the downside….take a look at the horrible word on this new medication the vet gave us:

We have to use this medication in Daisy’s ears twice a week for the rest of her life!

DH’s boss, who lives near us, uses a holistic vet who has worked wonders with his dog. Although our vet is excellent and I wouldn’t consider leaving him, I plan to take Daisy to the holistic vet just to see if she can give us something more natural to ward off these awful allergic reactions in the future. Fingers crossed!

We’re part of Thursday Barks and Bytes Blog Hop! Thanks to blog hosts 2 Brown Dawgs and Heart Like a Dog!

The Cone of Shame Returns….

What is going on in this family?! First I sprained my back, and yesterday one of my fillings started disintegrating in chunks….and my dentist can’t see me until tomorrow. I HATE needles and I know I’m in for a series – UGH.Plus I don’t know how my back will handle that chair of his. AND – now Daisy is back in the Cone of Shame! GEEZ!! Is there a target on us?!

Over the past week, we noticed Daisy was scratching at her left ear a little more than usual and shaking her head insanely like she was making a milkshake inside it. She’d just gotten her ears plucked a week ago, and that usually causes her to scratch and shake for a couple of days, but not to excess like this.

This time, she didn’t stop. But it did lessen.

Until yesterday.

After her morning walk yesterday, the shaking and scratching went into overdrive. She was shaking her head so hard that her ears were flapping like crazy – they sounded like a helicopter coming in for a landing. She was also scratching at the inside, which alarmed me the most.

Do I really have to wear this thing again?!

We had looked inside with a flashlight during the week and didn’t notice anything wrong. But yesterday the inside looked reddish-purple and raw.

Fortunately, DD was still home, so she arranged to work from home to take Daisy to the vet, since I can’t manage that yet (my first trial car ride over the weekend didn’t go so well…). The dear man took her in almost immediately. When he looked inside her ear, DD said he made a very disconcerting sound. Diagnosis: severe spring allergies made worse by the plucking. He didn’t use the word “infection” but I think she was close to getting one. Apparently it’s worse in the left ear but has started in the right as well.

This medicine sure makes me pant a lot!

So he gave her a shot and put some gunky stuff in her ear, which we have to do every day. This isn’t going to be fun; she really doesn’t like it, and I can only imagine how uncomfortable it must feel to her to have her ears filled with oily gunk. And now her ears are all oily on the outside too. Ick. Plus she has pills to take as well, though she’ll enjoy them since they’ll be in peanut butter – the thin silver lining. 🙂

If these things continue, she’ll have to have some allergy testing done. I’ve never had a dog with so many issues!

We had to resort to the cone to stop her from scratching her ears. Poor little thing – so sweet about letting us do what we have to, but I’m sure she’s not happy about it at all!

So….is there an expiration date on bad luck????

Oops He Did It Again….

Last year I wrote about what happens when you leave a man alone with an electric clipper and a dog. Daisy went from this:

Before

to this:

Who knew her ears were so tiny under all that hair?!

That time DD and I were out shopping for hours when this happened. The silver lining was that an equal amount of hair was left on each ear.

But apparently that was just luck.

This time, I only left the room for 2 minutes while DH ran the humming clipper through Daisy’s thick ear hair….and – you guessed it – it happened again!

It looks like a toupee!!

Okay, the hair on Daisy’s ears had grown very thick and there were some mats in there – we can’t seem to stop them unless we keep her hair cut very short and continually thin it out. But DH went overboard this time – I can’t even the ears out because one of them actually has a crew cut on the end!

Uneven ears?! I demand to see a mirror!

Yup, there's actually a crew cut at the end of this ear. ::sigh::

I’m hiding that clipper from now on. 😉

Daisy’s Bliss – The Ear Rub

What a frustrating day yesterday was! My ISP was – and still is – down nationally. Major outage. They don’t know when they’ll get their 4G service working again, and they’re a MAJOR provider! I couldn’t be offline a second day – as a freelance journalist, the internet is crucial for me. This morning I called them again and explained my situation, and they gave me a workaround to access the 3G network, which is still functioning. A bit slower and choppier because of the high demand due to the outage, but at least it’s working.

So it’s a short post today, since I have a LOT of catching up to do. But I just had to share this picture of Daisy getting her ears rubbed. She reacts like a person who’s getting a full-body massage after a weekend of hard yard work; she doesn’t move a muscle:

Ahhhhhh....don't break the spell......

Who Needs a Halloween Costume? This Havachon Has Bat Ears!

I think the picture says it all.

Daisy LOVES hanging her head backward or sideways over our arms – she falls asleep like that all the time! It looks so uncomfortable, but that’s our kookie little puppy.

She does have neck muscles that would be the envy of every pumped-up body builder!

Maybe we should just put some black bat wings on her and carry her around upside-down for Halloween….. 🙂

Hair Plucking….Yuck….

Little Daisy is sweet, petite, and adorable in so many ways….but she has the ears of an old man. A very old man.  Inside, not out.

There’s a mass of long gray hairs growing inside her ears that would win a world cup competition. They itch her and annoy her, but we figured that was just nature’s way of protecting her ears from foreign objects making their way in.

I don't know if I want to do this "plucking" thing....

Wrong.

The vet told us that we have to have her ear hairs plucked.

That’s right, plucked.

Women know the pain of plucking eyebrows well enough, and to think of all these masses of hairs being plucked from inside a puppy’s ears is enough to make a grown, pluck-hardened woman cringe. I asked the vet if this hurts, and he said it’s “uncomfortable”. Now, I know what it means when doctors say understated things like that – like a shot is just a little “pinch”, but it actually feels like a metal spike being jammed into your arm – so I’m figuring that this has the potential to be brutal. And considering the amount of hair we’re talking about, it’s not just one pluck, it has to happen over and over again….several times a year.

I talked to the groomer about it today, and she tells me that dogs actually “come to enjoy it”. Uh-huh. Like we come to enjoy root canals after we’ve had a few??

I guess this hairy-ear gene must run through the Havanese and/or Bichon lines. I’ll report the results on Monday – D-day is Saturday at 9 AM!