Follow Up on Pence

Hey, everyone!

I know it’s been a while again (my bad), but we wanted to give an update on Pence. In our last newsletter, we left off with Pence taking a trip to the vet hospital for what ended up being a ruptured anal gland. It took about two weeks to heal after the rupture.

For the next five weeks, she was completely fine and back to normal. Until a few days ago.

On Thursday, Riley noticed that Pence had scooted her butt in the yard a couple times that morning. That’s not something she does often, but she did do that back in November when the gland issues started.

Later that evening, I noticed she was holding her tail strangely again too. Upon further inspection, her OTHER anal gland had swelled up suddenly. Of course, the vet office had just closed for the day, so we decided to monitor and see what happens. By midnight, it was swollen up much worse than the previous one did. I called the nearest 24 hour vet hospital to talk to them to see if they thought we should bring her in over night or if we could wait and see our vet the next day.

They said that she needed to be seen for sure, but that they were already at capacity and could not take any new patients. They referred us to another place that was about 45 minutes away who was taking patients. When I called there, the estimate we were given on the phone was very expensive.

We decided to continue monitoring for a few hours, but no real change. Pence was sleeping fine so we let her sleep. She seems to have a very high pain tolerance, and it is not obvious when she is in pain. If she was in too much pain, she most likely wouldn’t be sleeping and we would’ve taken her in over night.

When 8am rolled around, I called the vet right away. They soonest they could see us was 3:45pm.

When we got there, the vet confirmed it was another anal gland abscess. She said they do not typically drain them or cut them open, but rather let them rupture on their own. We were sent home with three weeks of antibiotics this time and 8 days of pain medicine.

It was a waiting game to see when the gland would finally rupture. It was Saturday morning before it did, and luckily it happened outside. The vet did say that once it finally ruptured, Pence would feel better.

HOWEVER, also on Saturday morning, the left gland started swelling up too (the one that ruptured back in November). We were told it was unlikely that infection from one gland would get to the other gland. Everyone is quite puzzled.

On Sunday morning, the left gland ruptured again. So now, Pence has a double butt gland rupture and two open wounds. Because she tried to lick the open wounds, she has to wear the cone of shame again.

She seems to be back to her normal self, but I’m sure it is uncomfortable for her. Once both of these ruptures heal, she will go back to the vet for a more in-depth evaluation to try and figure out what is going on. One rupture could be a fluke, but three within two months is not.

There are a lot of things that can cause this to happen, so I guess we’ll start ruling them out one at a time. We did find out that her siblings and her pups are not having any similar issues, so that’s good news at least.

As for Boo, he is still hanging out at Beth’s house. He was about to come back to us, but then Pence started having issues again. We thought it would be better for her to rest and heal on her own, without the crazy dog around. He’s getting plenty of cuddles and treats in the meantime.

That’s all for now, talk to you soon!

-Hannah, Riley, Boo, and Pence