WE JUST NEED TO LISTEN TO WHAT THEY TELL US

Two weeks ago one of our 14-year-old Cocker Spaniels that we adopted 6 months ago started licking his right front foot. He has some breathing problems, so he made VERY loud, annoying slurping noises. It was so annoying I checked to see what he was doing. There was an ulcerated mass on the top of his last toe. I figured it was a typical Cocker wart, so I took him to the office and removed it using a local anesthetic. I threw the mass away with no further thought. That night, Scout continued licking the foot. I figured that now he was licking because of the tiny sutures in his foot. I applied LickGuard ointment, which he hated. Three or four times every day for a week, we coated the foot in LickGuard. Scout would run around the house like we had just really made him mad.

Fast forward ten days. The licking is constant. By now the sutures have healed. So I took an x-ray of his foot. Just what I feared: there was a problem with the toe itself. The bone within the nail was disintegrating. Most likely we were dealing with a nail bed tumor and those are rarely anything good. Surgery is risky with Scout due to his breathing issues and the fact that he can only open his mouth about an inch, due to scarring from infections earlier in his life. Intubation of his airway is difficult. But I was left with no choice.

I am happy to say that Scout was a champ through surgery. I amputated the toe at the level of the metacarpal/phalangeal joint, working really hard to focus on the surgery and not on the fact that I own this guy. It's hard to remain calm when it's my own pet on the table.

This is a photo during recovery. He is wearing a bandage and a boot. Now that he is home, he is trying to figure out how to hop on three legs when all legs are arthritic. I had to giggle when he tried to lift his hind leg on the same side to urinate the first time after surgery. Obviously, standing on two legs on the same side did not work out so well. He's still working on figuring that out, but for now, I help hold up the back end.

Biopsy results won't be back for a week, but I expect it won't be good news. We'll figure out what to do when we get them. I tell clients all the time not to ignore what their pets are trying to tell them. Scout was diligently telling me there was a problem. I kept trying to tell him to leave it alone. Sometimes we just need to listen better.