There is something about Dogger...

Well. Dogger is fine. I took her in for x-rays Friday morning and the vet told me that there is nothing wrong with her knee and while she does have some arthritis in her hips, its a very small amount. She's fine. Thank You God.

 He had me make an appointment for two weeks hence and he'll re-examine her then. I doubt he's going to find anything because whatever it is will have gone away until the next time.

It makes it hard. Do I ignore the lameness? This time I gave her a week to get better and  now nine days later she's looking a lot better. Is this going to happen a lot?  No explanation for the sudden lameness. Nada.  While I'm very happy that they didn't find anything there, no tumors, breaks,  infections, malformations, scar tissue issues - I don't like that there is no answer. If nothing is broken than nothing can be fixed.  I was hoping that we could fix whatever it is and Dogger wouldn't have to go through this again. She had made so much progress since the summer and now we're back to where we were in May. She's had a few instances of sudden lameness but they have lasted a day or so, this time it's been over a week and its not going away like it has in the past.

The earlier episodes she would limp around for a day or so, I would give her one her pills and then go back to where she was, this time the pills are working but when this happened before they were like magic bullets. They aren't quite blanks yet but... she is getting better but not to where she was and that worries me.

But, she is getting better. We weren't able to walk at all last week but on Sunday we went for two walks and we walked three times on Monday. Short walks, but walks. We went for our third walk Monday night and Dogger really wanted to go further, I had to bribe her with cookies to get her aimed back at the house. Walks  make her tired though, I noticed she was much more perky on Saturday than she was on Sunday but she had all that energy because she had been housebound for over a week and on Sunday she was going on walks and was no longer suffering from cabin fever and was feeling calmer.

She does well on her walks, but around the house she's still hopping around on three feet or walking with a pronounced limp. When she hurry, which she is a lot around the house, she doesn't put weight on it at all. When she's outside she's much better at using all four feet and being weight bearing on the bad leg. I used to call this "June", I would hate to think that all that rehab work and progress was for not.  The everything-is-great-everything-is-shite pattern is not good for Dogger and I'm not happy about it either. The everything-is-good phase artificially gets our hopes up, expesacly when it lasts for months. The few weeks of everything-is-shite phase really bursts our bubble. I again got used to her being good and getting better everyday and making nice progress. This non-good-non-progress thing sucks for us.

 Dogger hadn't been to the vet for her knee since before I left for vacation.

 This is the same pattern that she has displayed in the past, right after her surgery and all those infections and random pieces of jutting plastic and they couldn't find anything then either. If I had a lot of money I would find out what.