The Pet Ear Health Foundation Facebook ad: “The $4,200 Surgery That Started With Head Shaking”

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Emergency ear surgery on a dog is one of the worst conversations I have to have with a dog mom at 3 in the morning. Because 9 times out of 10, it started 6 months ago with something she didn't think was a big deal. I'm an ER vet, and I want to tell you what I wish every dog mom knew before they got to me. My name is Dr. Eli Marston. I work the overnight shift at a 24-hour emergency animal hospital just outside Charlotte, North Carolina. I've been an ER vet for 9 years. Before that, I did 6 years in general practice, which is where most of you have probably met someone like me, in the bright exam room at 4 in the afternoon, getting a script for ear drops and a follow-up in 3 weeks. I don't work that shift anymore. I work from 10 PM to 8 AM, and I want to tell you about a dog named Bear. Bear is a 6-year-old Cocker Spaniel mix, and his mom, Renee, brought him in around 2:45 in the morning last Tuesday. He'd been pawing at his right ear for about a day. By the time she got him in the car, the side of his face had swollen up, and there was blood coming out of the ear canal, and he was crying in a way she said she'd never heard from him before. What Bear had was an aural hematoma. The blood vessels inside his ear flap had ruptured from the constant head shaking, and the flap had filled up with blood like a water balloon. We had to sedate him, drain it, and place a surgical drain that would stay in for 2 weeks. The bill, after the imaging, the labs, and the overnight monitoring, came to $4,200. Renee sat in the consult room and cried while I explained it. And then she asked me the question I've heard so many times now I could write it on a card and hand it out. "Could I have prevented this?" I want to tell you the truth, because I told her the truth. Bear had been treated for ear infections twice in the last 6 months. The first time was in April. Her regular vet prescribed drops, told her to clean his ears daily, and rechecked him 3 weeks later. The canal looked better. They called it resolved. The second time was in July. Same drops, same cleaning, same recheck. Again, called resolved. What Renee didn't know, and what most dog moms don't know until they're sitting where she was sitting at 3 in the morning, is that an ear infection in a floppy-eared dog is almost never really resolved after one round of drops. The visible symptoms clear up. The redness goes down. The discharge stops. But down in the part of the canal that the otoscope can barely see, the biofilm that the bacteria and yeast hide inside of is still there. And every time it flares back up, the canal lining gets a little thicker, a little more scarred, a little more reactive. By the time a dog like Bear is on his third infection, the canal itself has started to change shape. It narrows. It produces more wax. It traps more moisture. And eventually, the head shaking gets violent enough, or the canal gets damaged enough, that something gives. Sometimes it's a hematoma like Bear's. Sometimes it's a perforated eardrum. The worst cases end up needing a procedure called a TECA, total ear canal ablation. We remove the canal. The dog loses hearing in that ear permanently. Those run $3,500 to $5,000 at most specialty hospitals. I'm not telling you this to scare you. I'm telling you because I see 3 or 4 Bears a week now, and almost every one of them started with a dog mom who was doing exactly what her vet told her to do. The piece most general practice vets aren't telling their clients, and I didn't tell mine either back when I was in GP, is that the window to actually interrupt this cycle is earlier than they make it sound. It's not after the third infection. It's after the first. The dogs I see on the surgical table at 3 AM are almost all floppy-eared breeds, Cockers, Bassets, Cavaliers, Goldens, and Labs, and almost all of them had what their first vet called a routine infection somewhere in the previous 12 months. About 8 months ago, a colleague of mine who still works general practice texted me a graph. She'd been tracking her recheck rates on chronic ear cases, and her repeat visits had dropped by about 60% over the previous year. I asked her what she'd changed. She said she'd stopped recommending daily liquid cleaning to her at-risk breeds, and she'd started recommending a textured wipe instead. She sent me the brand. I sat on it for about a month before I looked into it. What changed my mind was when I pulled 6 months of my own ER intake logs and cross-referenced the chronic ear cases that came back with hematomas or surgical referrals. Every single one of them had been on a daily liquid cleaning regimen between infections. N ot one had been using anything that mechanically removed debris from the canal. The product is called Uproot Ear Wipes. The design is a textured pad that fits over your finger, so you can physically reach into the canal and pull debris out instead of flooding more liquid into a space that already has too much moisture in it. The ingredients on the label, chlorhexidine gluconate and caprylyl glycol, are formulated to break down biofilm, which is the part of the infection that drops alone don't penetrate. That part matters more than I can explain in a Facebook post. The bacteria aren't sitting in the canal exposed. They're hiding inside a matrix. If you don't break the matrix, you don't reach the bacteria, and the infection comes back. I started recommending them in my discharge papers for any ear case that came through the ER in the last five months. My techs track returns. We've had three of those dogs come back. Three. In a category that used to send me five or six repeat visitors a month. I want to be straight with you. I don't sell these. I'm not affiliated with the company. I have no financial reason to type any of this out at the end of my shift. The math, though, I think about a lot. The wipes run about $15 a month on subscription. A chronic ear visit runs $150 to $200. A specialty referral runs $500 to $1,000. Bear's surgery was $4,200. A TECA, if it gets that far, is $3,500 to $5,000, and your dog never hears out of that ear again. If your dog has had one ear infection in the last 12 months, please don't wait for the second one. If they have got two, please don't wait for the third. I'm not going to tell you these wipes will work for every dog, because nothing works for EVERY dog. But for the floppy-eared breeds I see on the table at 3 AM, this is the intervention I wish their moms had been handed at the first vet visit instead of the third. I’ll leave the link below https://uprootclean.com/products/uproot-ear-wipes

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uprootclean.com

The $4,200 Surgery That Started With Head Shaking

Ingredients and Their Benefits Aqua/Water/Eau: Base for a smooth, gentle formula. Propylene Glycol: Hydrates and prevents dryness. Caprylyl Glycol: Moisturizes with antimicrobial benefits. Glycerin: Softens and conditions sensitive ear skin. Citric Acid: Balances pH for gentle, non-irritating cleani...