Dogs Are A Luxury!

I always remind potential buyers that dogs should be considered a luxury. We certainly don't need them, but they do make life much nicer and more satisfying - and potentially a lot more expensive! General maintenance is certainly affordable. Food, toys, obedience classes, shots, and perhaps a yearly vet check for healthy adults. No big deal. Then there are cleaning supplies and additional laundry, and any damage created by unsupervised pups - but that's the owner's fault - and perhaps board bills if you go on vacation (but that is part of the cost of the vacation. Still do-able and won't blow the budget, assuming the damage does not require new carpeting, re-sodding or a new sofa. But other things can happen too.

Coral has always been a healthy dog, and at 9+ she generally only visits the vet for her yearly bloodwork and a rabies shot every third year. She's a Power Chewer like her grandpa Morris was and enjoys working on those big shank bones, and at the age of two she fractured a tooth. Naturally, it was one of the carnassial teeth, a big triple-rooted tooth that is expensive to extract. Surprise!

We had been noticing a little blood on the floor for several days, but could not identify the source. I kept checking all the dogs but could not figure out where it was coming from. Pyometra? A draining tumor? What was it? Josie had just been in season, so it wasn't that. I thought it might be old Sid, but could not figure out what was causing the bloody looking fluid on the floor. Several days later I noticed that there was blood where Coral had been sleeping, and concentrated on her. Finally I saw blood on her nose. Her nose? When I checked, it was coming from inside her nose, so I googled the symptoms and found that it might be a foreign object (no foxtails in Minnesota), a tumor, etc. Omygawd, it's probably cancer.

We went to visit Dr. John yesterday, who checked her over and looked up her nose with an instrument. Ugh. Explained the possibilities and options - antibiotics, or to sedate her to check more carefully, or to do skull xrays, or a referral to the Vet school for a more serious exam with special equipment. He said that the most common cause of these symptoms was an absessed tooth. Go figure, an absessed tooth causes a dog to drip blood from its nose. And the most common tooth to cause the problem was the carnassial tooth, but Coral's carnassial on that side had been removed. He explained that because that tooth is huge and has three roots, that sometimes a bit of root remains after the extraction, especially when teeth are removed the way my old vet had done them years before. His hunch was that that was the problem. John's hunches seem to be good ones, so I opted for a sedated exam and skull xrays, and left Coral in their care.

Yep, John's hunch was correct. He dug a small piece of root out of her gum, and removed a lot of necrotic tissue. As he was doing that, the fluid was draining out of Coral's nose - the abcess had created a tract that allowed it to drain through the nose. Who would have thought it? Coral came home later that day, with her usual big grin, antibiotics, and a piece of tooth root in a pill bottle. And my checking account balance is unexpectedly lower . . .

Dogs are indeed a luxury. Too bad Health Partners doesn't cover dogs too!