Maya
Pet of the Month - July 2025
Maya is such a sweet, cute, 8 year old mix breed dog that is no stranger to ear infections. She has a long history of allergies (that includes ear and skin infections) and has been treated for numerous infections and managed for her allergic disease in between.
Because she has such an extensive history of infections, we are using her for the Pet of the Month to show the significance of diagnostics and rechecks in treating infections. Since she has been coming to us, she has had 16 ear swab cytology tests performed. These tests help us to determine what type of ear infection is present to help us determine what treatment we need to consider. It is not the same as a culture, but we can use the swabs to look under the microscope and based on the shape of the bacteria (rod vs cocci) or the presence of yeast or white blood cells can tell us a lot about what kind of infection she has! Some dogs tend to have one type of infection over and over, but any dog can have different organisms with different infections, so it is very important to do the swabs to determine the proper treatment to use with each infection. It is also necessary to help determine if the infection is improved during a follow-up visit.
There are different medication choices for rod vs. cocci bacteria vs. heavy yeast or whether there is the presence of heavy debris in the ears or not. It is very important to do that initial exam to try to assess the health and stability of the eardrum before choosing medications. The initial exam and cytology is a key component to get us in the right direction, but the follow-up exam is also extremely important and often gets pushed to the side by many people when they see that their dog (or cat) looks and feels better with treatment. Many people assume the infection is cleared and cancel their follow-up exam, but this could be a big mistake!
The majority of the medications we use to treat ear infections have a steroid in the medication so it makes the dog (or cat!) feel much better before the infection is cleared. Also, a dog’s ear canal is much longer than you realize so even if the ear looks clean and nice on the outside, it may not be fully cleared up deeper down in the canal. Many types of “mixed” ear infections can have yeast and bacteria and while one medication may clear up one aspect very well, the other part of the infection may need a different medication to fully clear up the infection. If a pet still has infection deeper in the canal, they may seem better for a while, but then the infection will get worse again and the symptoms will return much more quickly. This can make someone feel like their pet constantly has infections that don’t go away, but we may not have had enough treatment adjustments to get the best outcome.
Many allergy dogs will have recurrent ear infections, so even if you do the proper treatment and follow-ups, eventually they will have an infection again. The follow-up visits help make sure each infection is fully cleared to hopefully lengthen the time in between infections as much as possible. But also as important is the education we can provide at those follow-up visits when we are helping determine what type of home care would be the best plan to keep those infections from coming back so frequently. When the infection is finally cleared, we can show owners how to properly clean and instruct how often to clean for their pet’s situation. Allergy dogs like Mya can take all the help they can get to give them the best comfort and quality of life in between flare-ups!