If Something Painful Could Happen To Ones Mouth, We're Livin' It Here at Case de Olson

The teething continues (...will it ever stop??).  

After a couple of calls to our doctor yesterday, we came up with a more aggressive nighttime medication plan and some new daytime remedies.  Asher's been a trooper, but the discomfort is definitely starting to wear on him.

I swear, we are going to wake up one morning and he will have 20 teeth.

Helping mommy take his temperature.

New daytime remedy: frozen banana.

Harlan is especially watchful of Asher when it is obvious that Ash is having a rough day.

...and of course, because Harlan and Asher do everything together, 

Harlan has to have a mouth problem too.

 At 2:30 a.m. I got up to give Asher more ibuprofen.  Harlan jumped up and trotted after me (which he never does... dog. sleeps. hard.).  The whole way down the hall to Ash's room he was slurping.  If you know Harlan, you know he is a slurpy dog in general, and neurotically licks all the time.  So naturally, instead of being concerned, I yelled (yelled = hushed whisper) "Harlan, knock it off!", and tried to get him to go back to bed.  But he then went downstairs where I could hear him sloshing around in his water bowl.  I trudged downstairs, prepared to yell at him again, but when I turned on the light I saw a trail of bloody drool around the kitchen.  Oops.  I misread the slurping.  The entire right side of his snout was swollen- so much so that I couldn't see his bottom teeth, and his big jowly lips were about twice as big on that side. So I woke up Ben and we called the emergency pet hospital.  There first question was, "Could he have been bitten by a rattle snake?".  Welcome to New Mexico.  The answer was no, so we opted to give him enough benadryl to down an elephant and bring him to our regular vet in the morning (by 'morning' I mean 4 hours later).  

After examining him, the vet determined Har had been stung or bit by something venomous.  Here's the thing about this occurring in Albuquerque versus Iowa City.  In Iowa City, a vet would have looked at Harlan and said, "He got stung by a bee," because really, the only thing capable of this kind of mouth maiming in the Midwest is a hornet.  In Albuquerque, your vet says, "We can rule out a rattle snake bite, but it could have been a scorpion, a fire ant, or a black widow, *long pause*  or he could have been stung by a bee."  Good grief.  When I sent a text to my friend to explain why we weren't at library story time, she said, "Oooh, I just found a scorpion in our house yesterday.  I bet it was a scorpion!"  Son of a biscuit.  The idea of a scorpion creeping around our house in the wee hours of the morning with it's little stingy tail in the air ready to strike one of my loved ones makes me shudder.  I'm a lover of animals, but I swear, if something does to Asher what it did to Harlan I will hunt it down and it will die a slow and painful death.   

Anyways, back to Har. The bite already looked like it might be infected, so Harlan got a steroid injection, an antibiotic injection, and oral steroids and ATBs for the next week.  Poor Herbert.

The swelling went down considerably after the steroid injections, but you can still see how much puffier the right side of his mouth is in the pictures below.

The white blister is the actual bite/sting.

... it could have been worse.  I found this guy googling "bee sting dog".

Ending on a happy note... Asher's hair continues to be his defining feature (...that and the denty ear, and the huge, unblinking blue eyes, and the ever-present drool spot on his onesie... okay he's got a few defining features.)