This was a difficult day for various reasons, starting off with a trip to the vet for my little dog Charlie. It seems it’s a bit of a case of one step forward, one step back. His ear infection (the antibiotic resistant bacterial one) is slightly improved but by no means better. She was able to get a scope in there to look for the first time, as far as she can see his eardrum is still intact. She also saw at least one foreign body, possibly more. With  myself and a vet nurse holding him as steady as possible, she gently reached in with forceps and took out a grass seed. The poor little guy has had that in his ear at least since I got him in December, and possibly for a lot longer. It must have been incredibly painful. 😦 There may be another one in there but one was all he handle today.

Between the antibiotics and incontinence (about which nothing can be done except to keep him as clean as possible) he now has skin infections too, yeast and bacterial. That means medicated shampoo and extra baths every week. The vet checked his eyes, they are badly scarred but the current regime of eye drops is sufficient for the moment to keep them moist and prevent them ulcerating again. She also shaved any fur in areas that is often wet because this is inflaming the skin and leading to infections. He’s an odd looking little sheep at the moment.

So, I’m a little bit crushed that we haven’t made much forward progress and the vet bills are still far too expensive for me to easily manage. He has to go back in a fortnight to see if there is anything more in his ear, in the meantime I’ll flush it clean twice a day and add the medicated lotion. She was also talking about expensive diets which could push this whole situation into completely unmanageable. Ditto if he needs meds for his heart at some point, I just can’t sustain it. So I’m feeling flat about that.

There’s also quite a lot of stress going on with my neighbours at the moment, I need to padlock my mail box as things are going missing, and I’ve been told that my unit was once doused with kerosene and set on fire when someone local took a dislike to the last lady living here.

So I turned up and cried in Sound Minds today. (the Voice Hearer group I help facilitate) They’re such a good bunch. They looked after me. How ridiculous that the usual response from people when I say “I work in mental health” is something along the lines of “wow, isn’t that difficult, those people are nuts!” leaving me with the awkward – or slightly nasty, depending on my mood, response of letting them know I am one of ‘those people’. So, people were nice to me, I’m feel very tired about it all but I’ll figure something out.

I have at least been able to solve the problem of how to get the tablets into Charlie. Now, I sandwich them onto a milk arrowroot biscuit with a little bit of crunchy peanut butter, and he scoffs the whole lot down without ever noticing them. Phew!