Pobre Oscar!

Right after we got all moved in, late at night, I went to give Oscar a nice ear scratch and was horrified to find his left ear swollen up like some huge, freakish water balloon! We haven't had to take our dogs to the vet out here yet, so I shopped around and took him in to a doc with good reviews and a reasonable office visit price. My poor little doggy had a horrible ear infection and a hematoma (basically a big blood blister under the skin) in his ear! I felt so, so bad, in all of the moving hullaballoo I hadn't paid enough attention to all of the scratching he'd been doing. The vet came back with a quote to surgically remove the hematoma, and I immediately burst into tears. $1200!!! I started freaking out, there was NO WAY we could come up with that kind of money after we'd just paid a security deposit and fixed our mini. Paul, of course, was the voice of reason and calmed me down. We took the estimates home with us and started calling every vet in the phone book within 25 miles of us. We found this amazing vet who quoted us for a small fraction of what the other guy did - still a tidy little sum, but manageable. They took him in the next day and did the surgery, and everything went just fine. Here are the before pictures:

You can see his ear hanging all funny, it was totally jutting out and down in comparison to the other one.

Here you can see that almost the whole flap part of his ear was filled. Poor doggy!! He was so miserable. :(

Here are the after pictures, I love this first one it perfectly captures his face when we brought him home with the plastic cone on his head. He was SO mad about it for a couple of days and kept looking at me appealingly, like "Seriously? Come ON, get me outta this thing!!"

Here's his ear, all bandaged up nicely and its usual flat, floppy cuteness.
I'm sorry, I know I shouldn't laugh at it, but I can't help it. He looks so funny! I swear all the other dogs totally look at him like he's this dog geek haha. For the first couple of days he kept running into EVERYTHING with it. When we go outside Oscar's always got his nose to the ground, but with the cone on it keeps lodging in the grass and knocking him in the Adam's apple, haha, and I just can't help but laugh my head off at him sometimes.

He's back to being his usual happy, mischievous self again and tomorrow he gets to go back to the vet (the cheaper one! haha) to take off his bandages and hopefully his conehead, as well. I'm so, so grateful that we could find a vet we could afford and weren't forced to do anything drastic with our little doggy that we love so much.

love, mary