This is Riley. I don’t remember if I told you I’ve had ear problems for at least a couple of years. Sometimes, when you get to be almost 11, you don’t remember everything, you know? But I do know that my ears keep getting infected, and they have been miserable, and it’s been miserable having them cleaned out and then having the vet mess with them when they get too bad.
I really hate going to the vet. It scares me a lot, and it hurts to have them do anything to my ears and shots hurt, too. I freak out when they try to cut my nails, too. The entire lot of them aren’t strong enough to hold me still to steal my nails!
At the beginning of last month the vet suggested that it was time to “scope” my ears so he could see just what was going on. So early one morning, well before my wake up time, Mom Amy convinced me to get in the back seat of the car and we started down the road. I just knew she couldn’t be taking me anywhere good at that time of day, and I shook and cried and panted the whole 40 minute drive there. Oh, and it gets worse! They gassed me!! I fought like the devil, but in the end, I got really tired and fell asleep.
Miss Amy picked me up and I cried a lot that night but felt really good the next day. My ear didn’t hurt! The dogtor sent away what he cut out of my ear to get a histology report on what it is. Turns out it was a tumor, but the kind that is not something called malignant. Everyone seemed very happy about that. That’s not all they found while they were poking around inside my ear. They discovered that my eardrum has a hole in it! So I got more drops to put in just my left ear. It’s not so bad now that my ear isn’t hurting anymore.
Last week Mom Amy told my Andrew that she thought I had an eye infection. She saw yellowish puss around one of my eyes. Andrew said my eye was alright, and when she looked again it did look ok. Then, this past Wednesday night, I started licking my leg and using it to wipe my right eye. Over and over and over. Miss Amy got down on the floor with me to “see what was going on” and she found a little round lump on the inside of my upper eyelid. She said it looked like a swollen seed tick, but didn’t think it was. My eye was all red and I couldn’t stop blinking. Every time I blinked that dang thing rubbed against my eye. Well, you can guess what happened Thursday morning. I shook and panted the whole way there again. The dogtor said I needed to have it removed, and that I also had something smaller on the area around my left eye. I had to go back on Friday morning and breathe in that awful gas again.
I’m home now from having surgery on both my eyelids.
I mostly can’t keep my right eye open. They both turned out to be styes. The dogtor cauterized the one on my right eyelid. The other one was blocking my tear duct, and I would have lost that eye if it hadn’t been detected and removed. I wonder if that’s what private eyes do, detect eye styes. Oh wait, that’s a detective I was thinking about, not a detector. I’m getting pretty sleepy and not thinking too clearly.
My right eye is bothering me a lot. Since I ended up with this big ol’ collar around my neck, preventing me from rubbing it with my paw, I’ve been trying to rub my eye on other things, like the floor and Lucy’s behind. But she keeps whacking me with her tail. Anyhow, because of that, Miss Amy gave me a big dose of Xena’s sea beady oil. I’m starting to not care about my eye anymore. I’m getting pretty slee..zzzzzzz.
Xena Schnauzer Warrior Princess with Lucy and Chia 