Duke's Swimmers Ear Infection

Duke probably got some water trapped in his left ear from swimming at the dog park last Sunday and yesterday it became infected. When I got home he had scratched that side of his face until it was bloody. I cleaned up the bloody patch and treated it with an antibiotic spray then I went to work on that ear. I have a special cleaninig solution for that purpose. Duke is a very good patient. He let me squirt in the solution then using cotton balls I cleaned out a lot of black gunk. Pretty gross but no bad odor. Then I gave him a 25mm Benadril.
That kept him quiet until about 3:00am when he woke up scratching like crazy. I got up and repeated the ear cleaning and also cleaned up the bloody patch with a warm wash cloth. He seemed to really like the warm compress so I stayed up with him for another 20 minutes holding that compress to the side of this face.
This morning there was almost no dark matter but he is going to the Vet this afternoon for a through cleaning and antibiotics if needed. He'll propably get a prednasone shot also to ease the irritation.
Hopefully the Vet will give me somethoing I can use to treat those ears after each swim. If I just let him swim on his own he keeps those ears dry but when I throw out his bumper to retrieve he does that big leap and sometimes his head goes under.
Does anyone know of a good treatment to prevent Swimmers ears?

 

Ranger got swimmer's ear the first time we took him swimming at the lake (he has a thing for sticking his head under water, entirely, lol). We took him to the vet who gave us some ear drops, and the problem went away. Now i always clean his ears out with Q-tips and alcohol, and the occasional cotton ball. I don't know if this really works, or if he just hasn't happened to catch swimmer's ear since then. I know that for us humans in the family we use an alcohol/vinegar mixture in our ears after swimming to prevent swmmer's ear, but I never wanted to use that on a dog, since I didn't know how easy it would be to get Ranger to dump it out.

 

My Cocker mix used to get it every time hed been in the pool, what I did was after hed been in was use an alcohol based earwash, he did fine from then on. Talk to your vet about it though to make sure your using the right wash, theres a lot of different ones available OTC.

 

Poor Duke, I have gone thre that with Jake. We got a drying ear solution from the vet for Jake. You can use it after each swim to dry the ears out