We took our boy Murphy (7lb, chihuahua, neutered male, 2yo) in on Monday night to get checked out, he doesn't do well at the vet (he has a ton of anxiety with people touching him in a non-petting way, we had to muzzle him and even then he was wiggling around so much...no one could keep him still) so I would completely understand if the vet had a hard time accurately examining him. But after telling her his symptoms, lots of reverse sneezing and regular sneezing, and her exam she told us there didn't appear to be anything immediately wrong with him, his temp was a little elevated 103F (she associated that to the stress of the exam).

Her recommendation was 3mL children's Benodryl 2x daily with meals. Great. We've been doing that since Tues evening since we didn't have any at home (no kids) and the pharmacies were closed Mon night and Tues morning before work.

She said that we could try antibiotics, but she didn't think it was an infection since he wasn't running a high temp. She also mentioned the possibility of nose mites, but wasn't sure in the exam room what that treatment would be and she didn't look for them since she said they were pretty uncommon (I'm not sure how that is even diagnosed). Since we didn't want to just load our boy up with drugs for no reason, we opted to try the Benodryl and see how that worked.

Long story short, the Benodryl is kind of not working. It's working in the sense that he sleeps most of the day and doesn't sneeze while sleeping. But he looks really uncomfortable when he's awake and he will still sneeze. So I'm thinking another trip to the vet is going to be necessary (even if only for some antibiotics).

My question is: what can we do to help our boy get through another vet exam so it's easiest on the vet and on him? We want his next trip to result in a solution, and that will happen a whole lot easier if he isn't panicking the whole time.

Edit from comments there: We have tried having them take him in the back to be examined, and he's just as anxious and unwilling to cooperate. He wasn't always like this, only after we had him neutered him a few months ago. He used to be a really chill vet-goer.