Just walk on by


I took Dogger to the vet on Saturday to find out why her incision was open again and why there is there stuff coming out of it AGAIN. I was very comfortable with the incision being closed. I shouldn't have gotten comfortable. Now its open, but just a teeny little bit. Just a touch open. Just open enough to weep a little. The incision has a sad.

This was our seventy-third vet visit since March 30th . There are pregnant women in the last weeks of their pregnancies who spend less time in their doctors offices then we do. It’s a nice place and the people are very kind and Dogger loves them. Great. She also loves her other vet, where we also spend too much time.

Where would I be without my fuzzy friends? Not getting up early on Saturday to spend time at the vet, I can tell you that. Anyway, the vet agreed that the incision is indeed open but not very much and the weeping was probably caused by an errant suture that was trying to get out. He gave us more antibiotics because Dogger has been on antibiotics since March and we would both be shocked to not be on antibiotics. He felt around her knee and said it felt really good and very secure and it may just be a teeny bit infected but not very. He told me later he was afraid that he was going to find that there was infected tissue in the wound tract and that he was going to have to go back inside.

So mostly good news. We’re now two for two on that, first just pricy dog flu and not Addison crises and then just reappearance of minor infection and not needing to go back in for surgery! Whooo! Tiny is never going to the vet. Ever. Anyway. The bad news was that he is seeing a lot of wasting in the leg. Lots of it and that is not good and is a permanent condition and it will ultimately cripple her if it isn’t reversed. She is fully 25 pounds lighter than she was last July when she originally injured the other leg and most of what she has lost is muscle mass. Dogger and I needed to get to work on building her muscles up weeks ago. He told me to walk her more often for shorter periods of time because my previously scheduled half-hour-once-a-day schedule was not working out. I think the vet kind of wanted me to walk Dogger home from his office

Instead I drove her home and formulated a plan. We would walk morning, noon and night or something close to it for the foreseeable future.  I decided on a schedule of walking early morning, as-soon-as-I-get-home-after-work and then right before dark. For at least 15 minutes at a go.

We walked five times over the weekend.

Monday morning we went on our first early morning walk. I went into get Dogger and she gave her self a shake and wagged her nub and was all ready for a quick breakfast and her morning nap. Surprise! Before breakfast we went for a walk. At 5:40am. Dogger was not amused, she is not , it turns out, a morning dog. She was cool with her 5pm walk but still seemed a little surprised when we went out again hours later. She’ll get used to it.