Doggie Dentistry

Doggie Dentistry

So... I decided to grit my teeth, face this empty piece of paper tonight and try to put a few words on it that don't sound too much like drivel and dreck. Of course I'll probably be OK with them, but it'll be up to you to decide the drivel-ness and dreck-ness of what ends up here. So get your grading pencils sharpened and lets go!

March, in these precincts, is always an iffy go. It's what could be called, if you're a generous soul, a transitional month, a period of time when the iron grip of winter is supposed to begin to loosen and the warmer blessings of the springtime begin to show with more clement temperatures and the earliest flowers beginning to poke out of the warming earth. The maxim “in like a lion, out like a lamb” as a description of March is unfortunately a generality, not a specific. Some Marches follow the old adage, others are contrary and gleefully allow Old Man Winter some extra weeks to strut and fret upon this particular stage. So, with a week and a couple more days to go, is the Lamb gonna make his appearance? Or is the Lion gonna keep growling for a bit longer. Guess we'll find out 'fore too long.

It's seemed like a long, long winter this year and everyone is antsy for spring.

We had a fairly stressful go of it this past week, faithful reader, but I'm hoping the stressful part of it is over now. This time the author of our family's anxiety was our half-pint Schnauzer Barney.

It started one morning recently when my wife was playing with our dog and noticed some dried blood on his whiskers. She did some eyeballing of the pooch, peering here and there, and couldn't find any source of the blood. She washed it off his muzzle and, before leaving for work, mentioned it to me. I woke up enough to notice that there was a bloody spot on the carpeting next to the bed where the dog usually sleeps. It was about the size of a large grapefruit, so there had to have been a decent quantity of blood that would cause it. I checked out the dog also and didn't see any problem although it was a bit unnerving. I cleaned the spot from the carpet.

I discussed it with my wife and we decided he probably got a sharp piece of a rawhide chew and had cut the inside of his mouth. Odd but hey, it could happen. So we removed all the bones and pieces of rawhide that were laying here and there around the house. He wouldn't get cut again.

The next morning my wife had the dog on her lap when he started bleeding again. She took him to the sink in the kitchen and, seeing the blood was coming from his mouth, put a paper towel in there with some pressure and soon the flow stopped. That was enough of that, so I bundled him off to the vet that morning. She did an exam and after a long look finally found that he apparently had a bad tooth. Since it was a large canine molar and she didn't do extractions of that magnitude, she had me schedule a dental x-ray and extraction with another vet in town who specialized in doggie dentistry.

Yesterday I dropped him off at the pet hospital for this procedure. I received a call a couple hours later from the vet. He had Barney under anesthesia and had removed two teeth at that point in time. He had called to tell me that the dog had several more quite bad teeth and wanted my OK to continue with his extractions. I asked for the dog's prognosis after the extractions and he said it was excellent. I asked for a ballpark dollar amount and he gave it to me. It was expensive but less so than I'd feared. Since the prognosis was so good, I said to go ahead.

We got a call a bit later after the procedure was complete and the vet said he'd came through “with flying colors” and we could come get him later that day. He also said he expected Barney to be much better insofar as his general health was concerned as he would not be fighting the infections from those doggone bad teeth any more. He also said that, unlike a person who had gone through six tooth extractions and could be expected to be a while recovering, dogs usually were back up and raring to go in about 2 days.

Good news.

My wife picked him up after she got off work yesterday afternoon, and the vet was quite right. The dog was pretty active when he got home along with being very thirsty and hungry. We had to limit his intake for a while to make sure he was OK, but he's actually acting much better than he had for maybe the month or two before. We didn't know it, but he'd been hurting for a while.

He'll be on soft food for a week or two, but I don't think he'll be much the worse for wear and it'll be really nice to have a healthy dog back! Of course he's still sightless and a diabetic, but you'd be surprised at how little that bothers him. And as a possible bonus of this procedure he went through, the vet thought his diabetes might be much better also. We'll see about that in the days to come.

I feel really bad we didn't catch this problem earlier, but Barney's a pretty stoic little mutt and it's difficult to catch the signals of him hurting if he doesn't display much. In hindsight we can remember certain mannerisms over the past month or two that we should have equated with a problem, but we just missed 'em.

So now we have doggie toothpaste and a doggie toothbrush as a parting gift from his dentist. My question is this: how's he supposed to brush his teeth if he can't hold the toothbrush?

Wait a minute. You don't suppose that we're supposed to...

Oh lord, that ain't gonna be fun...