Life with a floppy-eared dog

I don’t know if this happens when you have a pointy-eared dog, but if you have a floppy-eared dog, you may have occasionally had to deal with the problem of ear mites. Now, when you take the dog to the vet, they give you a bottle of stuff. And if you are a good mommy or daddy, you try to put in his ears a couple times a week. The reason I say "try" is partially because I don’t always remember, and mostly because it is damn near impossible to actually do all by myself. His response to it is so incredibly disturbing that it’s hard for me to even try. But this week, he's been scratching furiously at his ear and yelping as he does, which makes me think I should increase the amount of times I do this (the vet told me to do it twice a day when I first got him so I know it’s OK to increase the “dosage”). But it’s hard.

The instructions on the bottle indicate that I should squirt it in his ear, rub his ear at the base, and then let him shake it out. Repeat as necessary, 1-2 times/week. I don't know if the people who write these instructions have ever had a dog or even seen a dog, for that matter.

The whole process starts out with a ridiculous shimmy-dance-herding move I have to do to get him corralled up into a corner so I can squirt him in the first place. No, I’m sorry – I should say, it starts with me searching all over the house for the bottle because I’m so traumatized every time this happens that I never have the presence of mind to leave the bottle in the same place twice. And if you’ve been to my house in the past 24 months, you know that, if I don’t actually have something in a specific spot, there is no way I’m just going to be able to find it by scanning the room. Which is another story for another time.

Once I get the poor guy backed into the corner, and he knows exactly what’s coming at this point so it’s already very tense, we begin the full-body embrace. This is where I try to wrap each of my limbs around some part of him, while keeping one hand free to hold the bottle and the other hand free to flip up the ear flop. I’ve tried just laying the flap over and using that hand to steady his head, but he is actually quite strong and fidgety and so I have to pin his ear and hold his head all with one hand. Now, picture that there’s a lot of flailing, squirming, and flinching (and that’s just me – hee!) going on as I try to get the bottle lined up just right to squirt it into his actual ear hole, then right as the stuff shoots out of the bottle, he wrenches his head and the stuff splashes all over the side of his face, my face, and anything else that happens to be in that area (the upshot of all of this is that neither I, nor any of my furniture, will ever have to worry about getting ear mites as we are all covered in a layer of ear mite killer juice). So at this point, he’s got ear mite killer juice pretty much everywhere except his ears, I’m practically marinating in the stuff, and he thrashes himself free of my full-body embrace, shakes his head violently in a way that makes me think he’s going to end up with severe frontal lobe damage, and then flops down on the floor, pressing his face along the carpet as he pushes with his back legs in some attempt to get the stuff off. Of course, the entire time this is going on, he’s crying and yowling and running around the house like he's on fire. The entire scene must look unbelievable to God and anyone else who might be watching. To add insult to injury, he then spends the next half hour licking the mite killer juice off of any part of his fur that it might have gotten on – which I have to think can not be good. I mean, if it kills mites, it doesn’t seem like something anyone should be ingesting. Oy. VEY.