Since Mack's surgery it's been hard to gauge how well he's doing since we are with him all the time. You really can't see improvement until you've been away from him for a while or someone else who knows him sees the changes. Minute changes are hard to tell close up. But over the weekend I kept noticing a distinct smell that was there when we picked him up from the hospital and then I noticed that he was sneezing a ton with rather copious amounts of fluid dripping from his nose. Nothing coming from the mouth, just coming from the nose and one eye opposite to the surgery, had a bit of a pus in it. He hasn't been sleeping as fitfully as he had when he first came home, but then again that was from all the medications, pain killers, and lack of sleep at the hospital. I'm sure the aftereffects of anesthesia had a lot to do with his heavy sleeping and I'm sure there is still some residual left from the sedation working itself out of his system. Sleeping a lot was to be expect, so when he was a little more restless last night I began to wonder if something was going on. Unfortunately we decided to stop the pain medications for one day to see how well he would do without them and by the time we were thinking of giving him one, he hadn't had anything to eat for hours. Never a good thing to give on an empty stomach and sometimes a treat is not enough on the stomach to give a heavy duty pain medication enough coating. He has not had pain medication since Sunday and we are sorry we didn't give him one last night.
I decided to contact the oncologist on call at the University with my concerns and she suggested that he be examined by our regular veterinarian and if she felt she needed to have a look inside his mouth that he would probably have to be sedated to have it done. It was not good news to hear that he would have to face being put under again, but instead of worrying about this and wondering, we decided to take him to our vet this morning. She will do the sedation this afternoon and invited me to come watch her examine him so we could both see what was going on in his mouth. If there is a small fissure she thinks it will close on its own, but if it's larger than a small hole, then she thinks the University should be the ones to perform the repair. I am praying we don't see a hole...
I decided to leave him there for the morning, because he would just be upset about going back in a few hours and he can't have anything to eat and I know he'd be waiting and wondering all morning why he wasn't getting anything to eat. As I left the clinic he was howling. I hated to do it to him because he knows the clinic as a place he doesn't want to be. It's a shame because he never had a fear of being left but because he can't hear and is constantly looking for us for cues and security, this is torture for him. Dr. O. assured me that it would be a relatively quick procedure and it would only take a minute or less to look inside his mouth and examine his nose and he would come out of it pretty quickly. I hate that we are having to do this to him since it will mean another 24 hour recovery from the effects, but if we don't do it and there is something going in, then we've let it get a foothold. We can't afford to have an infection in his mouth and we can't afford to have a hole. Two things that would complicate his recovery for sure.
A bit of comfort came to me when I brought him in this morning though, because when I showed them his face and called him the Frankendog, they admonished me by saying oh no, he looks great and it's not that bad and the incision looks great and he looks good. The vet. said it appears to be healthy healing all the way around. We can hope this is the way it will continue. If he has this much progress, it means nothing more will have to be done. We are praying for healing gums and incisions that look as good as the one on the outside.
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