We’re off to see the wizard (err, vet.)

Yesterday I gave up, threw in the towel, and took Silas to the vet for his current skin outbreak. I can treat the individual spots topically, but I’m just chasing them from place to place.

(A new bandana makes up for the vet.)

When I was bathing him before his appointment, because he had been rummaging in who knows what for five days on vacation (I definitely caught him rolling in bird poop), I noticed a red mark on his neck. A round red mark, and it had a little bug in the middle. After the bath I looked it over more carefully, and realized that the little bug was the world’s tiniest tick. I immediately went into Lyme disease panic, even though it’s extremely rare here and quite rare where we were vacationing. Fortunately, I’d already made the appointment. In the meantime, I noticed several other tiny ticks that I couldn’t remove solo.

I adore Silas’s vet, and, more importantly, Silas adores her. The standard of care at the office is very high, and the people are darned nice. The vet did her entire visit kneeling in the floor, even after Silas tried to pee on her leg.

The downside of an office with a high standard of care, in a well-off neighborhood, is the assumption that money is no object. Honestly, it mostly isn’t. But, oh my goodness, his vet bills are always a surprise.

For this trip we came home with:
Antibiotics
Ear drops (he’s scratched a horrible place in his ear, which now has the same infection his skin does)
New instructions for the antihistamine/steroid I picked up but didn’t need on vacation
A tick collar

They gave him a tick bath before he came home and cultured his ear swab. The office visit price was a third higher than usual, either because they’ve raised the rates or because we had enough issues to qualify for a higher one. They also expressed his glands, cleaned his ears, and trimmed his nails, “for free.” Uncharacteristically, they did not do a skin scraping, for which my $25 and I were very grateful, or the Lyme test.

I’ll leave you to imagine the total.

While I was there, I was a little smug that we had gone the whole summer without a visit. Then I remembered that we did, in fact, go in June about the hives. Which puts us up to: March, April, May (two trips), June, and August. The thing that is starting to seem odd is that we made it from September, when he finished his vaccines, until March (so, if you’re keeping track, next month we have to go back for vaccines). I keep thinking it will get better. March and April were both food allergy related, in May he had to be neutered and one day his face swelled up (maybe a bee sting), and June was a false alarm for the hives. It seemed like with the food allergy sorted that we finally had things under control, discounting freak events. Sigh.

How often do you and yours go to the vet? Almost every month is unusual for a young dog, right?