Update on the ear

The plug in Faith's ear needed to come out but the vet hadn't had a chance to do it yet.  And then I looked down one day and saw this.

It's gone!  She had lost the cap a couple times and I always found it, but I haven't seen the whole plug yet and it's been several days.  Her ear is now think and had a hard lump inside.  I'm not sure if it's a blood clot or scar tissue.  She doesn't seem to be bothered by it now and it isn't re-filling with fluid, so this must be the "cauliflower-ear" that I had read would be our outcome.

Poor Faith and Her Poor Ear

We'd seen that Faith's hematoma ear was swelling more and my heart was sinking as I admitted that she would need to have it drained by the vet and it wasn't going to heal on it's own.

This was a few days ago

When I left for work on Friday morning, it was a little more swollen, but I never would have expected to see what we saw when I came home from work just a few hours later.  When I walked in the door I saw her ear and she immediately started shaking her head.  I sat and held her ear while I called the vet and after a few minutes I realized that holding her ear in place was actually letting her relax and stop shaking hear head.  So I ran to dig out a scarf while the oldest held her ear and we tied her ear up flat.

She looks miserable, but I could tell she preferred this as compared to feeling that huge dangly ear

 Once we got to the vet, I decided to take a few pictures to document how bad it had gotten.

Faith has a Hematoma

Faith has a hematoma in her right ear.  This girl never expresses that she's in pain and a few nights ago when she got up into bed I grabbed her ears like I always do to pet her and she yelped.  I jumped up and switched on the light to check her out and saw that her right ear has this huge swollen bubble.  I did some googling and found out that it is a burst blood vessel in her ear and that's a sac of blood.

In the right ear you can see a line from the tip of her ear and then down the middle of it, above that is the entire bubble

I took her to the vet as they say that hematoma's in dogs are usually caused by excessive scratching or shaking due to ear infections, but they said her ears were perfect.  In fact they said she looked like she was in overall great health for a 10 year old dog.  They did say that at some point she must have torn her ACL in one of her rear legs and they confirmed that her joints are getting sore from arthritis, but they didn't see any major concerns.

The options for treatment are surgery, draining the sack several times until it stops re-filling with fluid, or waiting it out and eventually the body would absorb the blood and her ear would shrivel up like a cauliflower ear.  At this point, we decided to go with waiting it out.