07/17/2025
Today, we have a nice (hopefully non-controversial🙄) dog story with a happy ending that will give everyone a warm fuzzy feeling inside (except for those who don’t appreciate law enforcement, so if you are in that category please stop reading now and move along…..go on, get……without leaving any derogatory comments please🤨).
Meet Blaze. Blaze is a seven year old Belgian Malinois law enforcement canine, retired from the U.S. Border Patrol. Blaze spent many years faithfully serving our country by sniffing out illegal drugs and protecting our border. When Blaze’s handler retired from his service in the Border Patrol, it was decided to allow Blaze to retire also. So Blaze’s handler and his wife were allowed to adopt Blaze as their own.
In early April, Blaze started feeling bad. He was lethargic, not eating, and acting like his neck hurt. When he presented at the clinic he was obviously in pain and I thought he had pinched a nerve in his neck. After a few days of anti-inflammatories and pain medicine he didn’t get any better. So we had Blaze come back to the clinic in order to run some bloodwork. When my technician was pulling blood from his jugular vein she (Sam) noticed a slight swelling on his neck. The bloodwork showed a spike in his white blood cell count, so we assumed he had some type of infection under the skin of his neck. Over the next few days, despite being on some very good antibiotics, the skin on his ventral neck started to slough. And it kept sloughing, and sloughing, and sloughing.
In hindsight Blaze’s owners remembered him chasing a feral cat a few days before getting sick. So, I’m assuming it was a cat bite because they are known for creating large, nasty abscesses. The Mrs.Dr. Spears thinks it was a snake bite (despite the fact that the swelling took over a week to develop, which is very uncharacteristic of snakebites, and no snakes were seen).
So anyway….we’ll call it a “snake bite”😉.
Since Blaze had so much dead tissue hanging from the “snakebite”🙄, we decided it needed to be debrided. So we anesthetized Blaze, removed all the nasty stuff, sutured up what little we could, and planned to allow it to heal as best it could on its own, thinking it would probably require skin grafts due to its large size.
So for the last few months Blaze’s owners have been diligently administering antibiotics, both orally and topically, as well as doing hydro-therapy on the wound. Ultimately, Blaze healed so well that no skin grafts were needed.
These photos testify to the incredible and amazing healing ability of man’s best friend. And to the persistence and perseverance of Blaze’s dedicated owners.
Today, Blaze is running around chasing his ball like nothing even happened, and most people would never know Blaze had tangled with a vicious “snake”.😉
