Left Knee - Days 2 & 3

October 24th, 2006

Sunday and Monday went better than we expected. Murphy’s confidence came back once he went outside for the first time. Now, he has no problem standing up in his kennel or initiating that he has to go outside. Once outside however, he continues to walk the perimeter of the courtyard in an attempt to find ‘the right spot’ to do his business. You can tell that he has had surgery because he hobbles along. However, he does it rather quickly so that he doesn’t have to keep weight on either leg for too long. Yesterday he made his first pile. Even with two bum legs, he still manages to do the ‘poop-n-scoot’.

The bruising on his knee is starting to lighten, and the oozing has finally stopped. We are supposed to ice his knee to help with the swelling. The past two days he had any ice however, he has done all that he could to stop me from icing it, with the exception of showing aggression. He scoots to the far side of his kennel, or tries to hide his leg when he sees the ice pack. We decided to give up on the ice, even though he needed it, because he still had some oozing at that time.

His pain has lessened and he has figured out when he is getting his medication. The other day he kept eating only the bread the pills were buried in, and would spit the pills out when he was done. Rob finally came up with a creative idea. He dipped the bread balls in ice cream, which is one of Murphy’s favorite things. Sounds crazy, but it worked!

Today he was alone for a few hours so he was sentenced to wearing his funny hat. This will be his sentence for the next two weeks whenever we can’t watch him for more than a few minutes. We learned our lesson from the last time.

We’ve decided to not start his daily therapy just yet. We want to him to get more comfortable walking on his leg because once we start therapy we’ll have to force him to walk more slowly. We also are doing this to make sure that too much activity doesn’t make it start oozing again.

Something new that Murphy will get this time around from Southpaws (included in our price) is an appointment with a doggy physical therapist, politically correct it is called a “Canine Physical Therapist”. Carol Wasmucky owner of Pet Rehab http://petrehab.net/about.htm is working at Southpaws and will be designing a rehab program specifically for Murphy. We are scheduled to meet with her on November 6^th when Murphy gets his stitches out.

In the next few days Murphy will get his puppy couch back so that he can once again stretch out and feel like part of the family.