TheBanyanTree: Crook dog

[PJMoney]

One morning, apparently all apropos of nothing, he was limping on his right
hind leg.  I checked it for wounds but there was nothing to find.

Over the next couple of days the limp worsened until he could no longer lift
that leg to pee nor stand on it while he lifted the other one.  An adult
male dog piddling with all four legs on the ground is a disturbing sight.
Things are just not supposed to be that way.  And since he'd pretty much
stopped eating as well it was time to take him to the vet.

The vet thought the problem was probably in his knee.  He had to have an
X-ray and, because of his corgi shape, that meant a general anaesthetic
which was scheduled for the following morning.

It turned out that he had severe arthritis in the knee and a ruptured
anterior cruciate ligament.  Because of the arthritic changes, the vet said,
there was no point considering surgical repair.  Given time the medial and
lateral ligaments would take over much of the job of stabilising the knee
and while that was going on we should give him a daily dose of analgesic
with his meal.

Giving him his dose of pain killer was problematic because his appetite
remained poor.  But within ten days or so the limp had improved somewhat so
I didn't feel too bad about leaving him at a kennel while we went south for
my mother's 80th birthday celebration and my husband's 50th birthday gift -
four days at Craigieburn, playing golf.

On the second day after we got home he started limping on his left fore-leg.
The muscles in his neck were twitching, his head was hanging to the right,
he was hot and he was way off his food again.  So back we went to the vet.

This time she said she thought he had a pinched nerve in his neck.  She gave
him an injection of some sort of analgesic useful for acute conditions and
recommended that we continue with the oral analgesics as well.  That's when
I told her how difficult it was to make sure he got a dose every day because
of his poor appetite.  She said, "You could try giving it to him in some
ice-cream."

Now why hadn't I thought of that?  Probably because sometimes I can be
extraordinarily stupid.  But I made up for that by thinking that if
ice-cream would work then chocolate ice-cream would work even better - as
long as it was melted to room temperature.  And it did.

Within a couple of days one would simply have to say, "Taffy, medicine," and
he would rise from his sick bed and limp out to the kitchen, licking his
lips, to receive his treat.  So it went for about a week and then,
unaccountably, the fore-leg limp got worse again.  

I started to worry that maybe he had cancer and was afraid to take him back
to the vet in case she suggested we have him put down.  After sixteen years
what happened to my father still bothers me so much that I can't deal even
with the idea of euthanising a dog - at least not when the dog is not
obviously in terrible pain and can still manage to stagger outside and look
after his toilet business by himself. 

But then, while giving him a scratch, I felt a lump in his fur.  It looked
to me like just matted hair.  Maybe he had just lain on a small piece of the
kangaroo meat he gets fed every day and it had got stuck in his fur.  But
Jimbo, who had come home with us from Sydney, decided to give him a bath so
we could properly see what was what.

It turned out that Taffy had two small wounds in his side.  I have no idea
where he got them from - unless maybe he managed to stab himself on a bush
while wandering about, looking for a good place to crap, in the more densely
overgrown areas of our yard.  

So we clipped the fur around the wounds, applied paw-paw ointment (great
stuff!) and band-aids and the next morning we had our eleven year old dog
back again!  He still has a slight limp in the back leg but his eyes are
bright, his face is not drawn, his appetite is normal, he'll roll onto his
back for a tummy scratch and yesterday he even frolicked a bit when we gave
him his share of our Sunday morning croissants.  

Janice