Last night he started limping. We figured he had just slept on it wrong, but by this morning it swelled up. He's licking it obsessively and his limp is worse so it's obviously very uncomfortable.

My first thought was that he had broken something, but he doesn't express that he's in pain when we touch it. Just licks. I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out what happened myself. We took him to the dog park Sunday morning, but when we left he was still his normal self. This started yesterday somehow.

Yesterday he hardly ate or drank anything, and slept a lot. The hardly eating and sleeping a lot really isn't out of the ordinary because he does skip some days. I was able to look at the pad of his paw a little more closely and there's a very small cut slightly off to the side. And this is the paw he occasionally accidentally pees on when he squats, not sure if that matters or maybe it's an infection...

We decided to watch him closely for a day or two. If it gets any worse than this or just doesn't get better we'll take him to the vet. I wanted to take him right away, but this is my husband's first day back on the ship and we don't know when he'll be coming home or what's going on with him today, so he needed the car.

I am freaking out a little bit, though. My family has had tons of dogs and I've never seen a swollen paw so I don't know what I should be doing or what could have caused this. Has this ever happened to your dogs?

I havent had exactly happen but I have dealt with bites from mice and a squirel biting a good chunk out of my previous dogs leg that involved some swelling and open wound, and we've had swelling after surgery before. When I had the squirrel bite my dog I had washed the wound with mild soup and water, peroxided it and risened it then put neosporin on and tried to keep it wrapped i couldnt get to the vet for a day and he wasnt worried because she wasnt bleeding much and had her shots. When we did go in vet said sje was fine and that we did right cleaning it and putting the antibiotic on. He told us to do this after surgery the same dog had to remove a tumor from her back, a gently wipe down and neosporin.
My current two had been playing and got a paw stuck in a choke collar and Jaspers paw swole to about twice its size, I put him in the crate early that night and the swelling had gone down by the next morning.
I would try to clean and treat the wound you found and watch him. Use some neosporin a

Sorry meant to say wrap it of you can if he will let you with out chewing it off.