Bloom Pet ad: Bred For The Face, Not The Skin

I am going to say something that nobody who owns a French Bulldog wants to hear. Your dog was built to itch. Not because you fed him the wrong food. Not because you missed a flea, or let him roll in the wrong grass, or waited too long to call the vet. Because of what a Frenchie is. They were bred for the face. The bat ears, the flat little nose, the barrel body, the wrinkles. People paid for the face, so the face is what got bred, litter after litter, for over a hundred years. Nobody was ever breeding for skin. And the skin they ended up with loses the fight. Against pollen. Against dust. Against the grass in your own backyard. Every spring, and every year a little worse. Apoquel doesn't change that. Not the pills, not the doubled dose, not the prescription food you add on top, not the shot your vet says will "get him over the hump." All it does is turn the volume down on a fight your dog is still losing. I know because I gave my Frenchie Apoquel every morning for twenty-two months. I noticed things for a living. Thirty-four years of it. And I missed this for almost two years, while it was happening at the foot of my own bed. If you have a Frenchie, or any short-coated, wrinkle-faced dog who will not leave his feet alone, and there's a bottle of Apoquel next to your coffee maker right now, I'm talking to you. Read this entire post. It's long. So were the twenty-two months. MY NAME IS DEBRA My name is Debra Collins. I'm 67, and I live in Mesa, Arizona, in a stucco house off Brown Road with a lemon tree that makes more lemons than I can give away. I was a dental hygienist for thirty-four years. The last twenty-one at the same practice on Main Street. If you've had your teeth cleaned, you know the job. You lie back in that chair for an hour while somebody studies your gums from four inches away. That was me. Eight patients a day. I looked at gum tissue for a living. Pink and firm, or red and puffy. I could tell whether a man flossed before he'd finished saying good morning. I could tell who was going to lie to me about it before they lied. My husband Ron used to say I could spot a chipped tile in a hotel lobby from the parking lot. Ron passed three years ago this March. His heart. He was out front mowing. I'm telling you all this so you understand one thing. I am not a careless woman. I don't miss things. That's what makes the rest of this so hard to write. GUS AND LULU Gus was Ron's idea. He'd wanted "one of those little bat dogs" for twenty years, and for his sixty-fifth birthday I finally gave in. We drove down to a breeder outside Casa Grande and paid $3,800 for a fawn boy with a black mask, which I still think about. Gus is five now. Ears like two satellite dishes. A snore you can hear from the mailbox. He is the gentlest animal I have ever known. He lets the neighbor's cat eat out of his bowl. The breeder gave us a photo of him at eight weeks, sitting in a folded dish towel. Little pale paws, the color of a biscuit. That photo is still on my refrigerator. Remember those paws. They are the whole story. Lulu came the summer after Ron died. A black brindle Frenchie, three years old now, about the size of a loaf of bread, and she runs this house. She decides when Gus gets the good end of the couch. She decides when I get up. At 4:30 every afternoon she plants herself in the kitchen doorway and barks once, sharp, like a shift supervisor, until dinner happens. Gus lets her. Gus lets everybody do everything. Which is why it was so hard to watch what his own skin was doing to him. RUST It started that first summer without Ron. Gus was a little past two. He started chewing his front feet. I blamed the heat. An Arizona patio in July will burn a dog's pads, so I bought him a set of little booties. He ate one. Then I noticed the color. His front paws were turning rust. Between the toes first, then up the fronts of his legs. That reddish-brown stain a light-colored dog gets when he licks the same spot all day long. If you have a fawn dog or a white one, you know exactly what I mean. He looked like he'd been wading in sweet tea. So I did what I'd done eight times a day for thirty-four years. I got down close and I looked. Between his toes the skin wasn't pink. It was red, swollen and shiny. It looked exactly like the gum line on a man who swears to God he flosses. Then his belly went pink. Then his armpits. Then the deep fold over his nose went raw and started to smell. Then his ears. And at night I'd lie there and listen. Lick, lick, chew. A tiny wet click every time his teeth caught a nail. On and on in the dark. Hours of it. WHAT TWENTY-TWO MONTHS COST I keep records. You can't be a hygienist and not. Every chart I ever wrote had a date, a number and a note. So I can tell you exactly what we did, in order. First vet visit, $89. "Allergies. Very common in Frenchies." A steroid shot and a week of pills, $64. He was perfect for eleven days. Second visit, $89. Skin scrape, $145. Antibiotics for the infection between his toes, $52. Medicated shampoo, $38. Then she started him on Apoquel. I'll be fair to it. That first month was the best month we'd had all year. He slept. He quit chewing. I sat in the car outside the pharmacy and cried, I was so relieved. It was $112 a month at the clinic. I found it for $94 online. By month four, I noticed he was chewing again in the late afternoon. Not much. Right about when the morning pill would be running thin. I wrote it down. By month eight, the vet had him on it twice a day. $188 a month. By month fourteen, we added a prescription food. $104 a bag, a bag every five weeks. Gus hated it. Lulu loved it, which caused its own problems. By month eighteen, we added ear drops, and one Cytopoint shot on top of the Apoquel "to get him over the hump." $135. It got him over the hump for about five weeks. Then a deep infection in the fold of his nose. $210 with the culture. Here's the page from my notebook, added up the way I used to add up a day's charges. Apoquel, 22 months: $3,478 Vet visits, 9 of them: $801 Steroid shot and pills: $64 Skin scrape: $145 Antibiotics, 3 rounds: $156 Medicated shampoo, 4 bottles: $152 Prescription food: $728 Ear drops, 3 bottles: $123 The one Cytopoint shot: $135 Nose fold infection and culture: $210 Booties, cones, allergy chews: $186 Total: $6,178. That's not counting the $3,800 for the dog. And it's not counting what it did to me, lying awake listening to that little wet click. And every one of those dollars came with advice. That's the thing about owning a Frenchie. You can't walk him around the block without three people telling you what you're doing wrong. The Frenchie groups online said switch him to salmon. Then lamb. Then raw. Then no chicken, no grain, no anything. Wipe his feet after every walk. Apple cider vinegar on the paws. Coconut oil on the belly. A spoonful of yogurt. A woman at the dog park told me it was anxiety and I should buy him a weighted vest. My sister in Tucson said, "Maybe he's just a licker, Deb." The breeder said she'd never had a skin problem in her lines. After that I looked at the photos of her other dogs on her website. Half of them had rust on their feet. And our vet, who is a kind young woman and good with him, said the thing I heard more than anything else. "He's a Frenchie. Skin is part of the package. We'll keep him comfortable." I tried everything on that list. Every food. Every wipe. Every oil. What I didn't understand yet was this. Every single thing anybody told me was aimed at what was landing on his skin. The food going in, the pollen coming down, the itch on the surface. Nobody aimed anything at the skin itself. And the vet was right, she just didn't take it far enough. It was the package. It was how he was made. Which is exactly why a pill was never going to fix it. THE GROOMER IN GILBERT The person who finally said it to me wasn't a vet. She was a groomer. Teresa Villanueva runs a grooming van out of Gilbert. She's fifty-eight and she's been grooming for twenty-six years. She mostly does the flat-faced breeds, she told me, because nobody else wants them. They overheat, they snort, they bite the dryer. I'd booked her for nails and face folds, because Gus screams at the clinic and Teresa comes to the house. She got him up on the table in the van. She picked up his front foot, spread his toes with her thumb and looked for about two seconds. "Apoquel?" she said. I asked her how on earth she knew that. "Because I see this foot every day," she said. "Red between the toes, rust up the front, and a mom who looks like you do right now. I could pick the Apoquel dogs off my table blindfolded." Then she set his foot down and looked at me. "Can I tell you something nobody who owns a Frenchie wants to hear?" I said go ahead. I'm sixty-seven. I've heard everything. "I do about forty bully dogs a week," she said. "Frenchies, English bulldogs, pits, Bostons. They've all got the same skin. Short coat. No undercoat. Folds that never dry out. Skin so thin you can see pink through the fur on their bellies." "The breeders bred the face. Nobody bred the skin. These dogs are born with a weaker wall than a Lab, and then everybody acts surprised when it leaks." "That pill's a mute button, honey. It doesn't change what he was born with. It just stops him telling you about it for a few hours." I stood there in her van with the dryer ticking and didn't say anything for a while. Because I knew exactly what she was describing. I'd seen it eight times a day for thirty-four years. THE BLUE MOUTHWASH Here's what I mean. Every hygienist has a patient who rinses with the strong blue mouthwash right before his appointment. Swishes it in the parking lot. He thinks if his gums don't bleed when I check them, I won't know. It doesn't work. The mouthwash numbs things and covers the smell. But the tissue underneath is still thin, and the gum is still pulling away from the tooth. I find it every single time. The first thing they teach you in hygiene school is what a gum is made of. It's collagen. Mostly collagen. When the collagen is thick, the gum hugs the tooth like a turtleneck and nothing gets under it. When it thins out, little gaps open, whatever's in the mouth gets in, and the tissue goes red and angry and bleeds. Standing in Teresa's van, it hit me. Apoquel was the blue mouthwash. Skin works the same way gums do. The barrier is built from collagen. When the collagen runs low, the wall gets gaps. Pollen gets in. Dust. Grass. Mold. And the body reacts to all of it at once. That reaction is the itch. It's the scratching and the licking. It's the red belly, the hot spots, the ears, the rust on the feet. It's all one thing. Apoquel mutes the reaction. It's good at that. But it never puts one bit of wall back. So the reaction always comes back. That's why his morning pill was running thin by the afternoon in month four. The pill hadn't gotten weaker. The wall was still leaking, and nothing in that house was fixing it. Now take a breed that starts life with a thinner wall than most dogs. That's a Frenchie. That's every flat-faced, short-coated, wrinkly dog you've ever loved. They don't have much to lose before the gaps show. So here's the breed truth, the part nobody wants to hear. You can't change what he was born with. But you can give his body the material to build more. I asked Teresa what she'd do. She reached under her table and pulled out a little brown bottle with a dropper. Her own dog was asleep on the passenger seat, an old English bulldog named Tank, nine years old, with a belly as pink and clean as a baby's. "Collagen," she said. "It's what the wall is made of. So you put collagen back, every day, and you give it time, because skin is slow." The bottle said Bloom Triple Collagen, by a company called BloomPet. Hydrolysed collagen from deep-sea cod. Types I and III, which are the ones skin is built from, plus hyaluronic acid and glucosamine. She turned it around and tapped the label. "Cod," she said. "Not chicken. Chicken's the first thing a lot of my itchy dogs react to. You don't fix a leak by pouring in more of what's leaking." One dropper on his food, once a day. That's all it is. "I don't sell it," she said. "I trim nails. But I can tell you which of my dogs are on it by their feet, too." MY CHART I'm suspicious by trade. Every patient lies a little about flossing. So I didn't take Teresa's word for it. I charted him. Every night from nine to eleven I sat on the couch with my notebook and counted how many times Gus started in on his feet. I counted the clicks, if I'm honest. A start was a start, whether it lasted ten seconds or ten minutes. Week 1: 14, 13, 15. Nothing. He licked the dropper, then his bowl, then Lulu's bowl. Week 2: 11. Feet still rust. The smell from the nose fold not as strong. I wrote "maybe" and underlined it. Week 3: 8. Between his toes, the red was going pink at the edges. I know what tissue looks like when it starts to firm up. I've watched gums do it. This was that. That same week, Lulu started licking her front paw at night. The same little wet click. I stood in the hallway in my nightgown and said out loud, "Oh no you don't." Because that's the breed truth too. If it's how they're made, the second dog isn't luckier than the first. She's just younger. Lulu got her first dropper the next morning. She had one pink paw and no rust. I was not going to wait twenty-two months this time. Week 4: 5. The fold over his nose was dry. First time in over a year. Week 5: Fur coming back on his belly. Soft, like a peach. Week 6: 2. And I noticed something only a woman like me would notice. The new fur growing in at the base of his toes was pale. The rust was growing out, like a dye job. The tips were still red, but underneath, coming up from the skin, it was biscuit. Week 8: Zero starts, three nights in a row. I sat there with my pen until a quarter past eleven, waiting. Nothing. Just that snore you can hear from the mailbox. Month 3: Recheck at the vet. She looked at his feet a long time and said, "Whatever you're doing, keep doing it." We let the Apoquel run out after that. He never noticed. Lulu never got past the one pink paw. Month 4: Teresa came back for nails. She snipped the last rust-colored tips off his feet with her little scissors and held one up to the light for me, like a pulled tooth. IF YOUR DOG HAS RUST ON HIS FEET It's called Bloom Triple Collagen, by BloomPet. Hydrolysed cod collagen, types I and III, with hyaluronic acid and glucosamine. One dropper on the food, once a day. No chicken. Nothing to chew. Gus thinks it's gravy. It's only sold on their own website, bloompet.co. Not in stores, and not on Amazon. I get the Buy 2, Get 1 Free box. That's $39.98 for three bottles, so about $13 a bottle. One week of Gus's Apoquel cost me more than that. They say more than 100,000 dogs are on it now. Teresa says she sees more of them on her table every month. I've been suspicious this whole letter and I was suspicious of this too. I've seen the ads. I know what Facebook is. What got me to order was that it comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. Ninety days is about how long I used to give a patient to show me healthier gums before I believed a word of it. That seemed fair. If you own a Frenchie, you already know in your gut what I'm telling you. It's the breed. It was always the breed. You didn't do this to him. But you don't have to accept the rust. Last week I took the breeder's photo off the refrigerator and held it next to Gus's front foot in the kitchen light. Same color. Biscuit. EDIT: People keep asking where I got it. Only from bloompet.co. Teresa says she's seen bottles online with almost the same name, and she wouldn't put them in Tank. Here's the real one so you don't have to scroll back up. 👇 bloompet.co/products/bloom-triple-collagen