Greenstorm's Journal

So just over a week ago Solly got her first TPLO surgery. If you don't know what that is, it's where they take the end of the tibia, cut it off, and rotate it about 20 degrees to create a stable platform for the joint. It's done when the tendons tear, which is ultra common in big dogs -- especially in big dogs who are "explosively" active, which is to say do sudden movements but not necessarily just a lot of movement, and I suspect in dogs who aren't carefully bred to avoid it.

Solly's ACL (or CCL on dogs and ACL on humans?) tendons were both gone. She was running around ok because, as I learned from Avallu, these dogs are more stoic than one can imagine, but it wasn't going to last long, and it hurt a lot. This surgery, or euthanasia after not too long, were the options. Back when I learned about this a friend offered to help me with the cost of surgery. Neither of us knew it would be just a few days after Avallu died. I cannot properly express how grateful I am that we can do this, that I'm not staring down losing two dogs in one year.

A week ago she went in and we came home with a big ziploc baggie full of pill bottles, a couple pages of instructions, a series of one-a-week phone calls with the vet scheduled, and advice from the vet to take it one day at a time.

She was heavily drugged for the ride home, because it's a roughly two-hour drive to the vet, and she's not supposed to be on the leg much for the first two weeks. She had the whole backseat of the truck with the seats out. Even so she sat up in her big cone collar, her chin propped on the console next to my arm, with her head slooooowly drifting downwards into a doze on the console and then snapping up groggily over and over to watch the road ahead.

After a couple days she started crying quietly in her crate. She was also reluctant to go in, though she would if I was insistent. She didn't cry when let out to curl up -- on leash, always on leash -- on the floor, and I finally realized that she couldn't fully stretch out in the crate and she wanted to stretch her surgery leg and her head both. From the tip of the cone collar to her toe when stretched out is over 5', there isn't a crate like that made, so I rigged up the hallway downstairs and she's much more comfortable in a nice 8' chunk of hallway, but only after sleeping on the sofa downstairs with her leash in hand a couple days. We're both happier now.

The cats are pretty happy because they can headbutt her and rub between her legs easily and she can't interfere with the cone, though if they're happy enough to purr she'll growl at them. She's never learned to properly interpret purrs as anything other than a growl.

I think the antibiotics were rough on her stomach. She's never been a big eater anyhow, and under her floof she has always been skinny. The meds are all take-with-food but I could barely get food into her at all; when the antibiotics were over, which coincided with the hallway change, she's started eating a bit more. We've also managed to find a pill solution. she chews her food carefully and can spit out pills except, I recently realized, if they're in roast beef chunks. So we're doing that and we're all relieved. She does not like pilling and in the beginning she had seven pills twice a day, and she'd growl to signal she needed a break after 4 or so, then after ten minutes would accept the others. I very quickly was reminded to cut my fingernails real short for it too.

It's astonishing she still loves me, honestly, but she clearly does. She knows the routine, recently shifted from 4x outside just to pee to 4x outside to pee and a 5 minute walk. She'll go willingly into the house (even when she was crated) after our walk, though she has been very happy to do bits of perimiter patrol on our walks. She even accepts the physio exercises, flexing and extending the leg and getting it massaged. I try very hard to allocate time, not just for the walk, but right afterwards for love and snuggles indoors so she doesn't just get dumped indoors and left totally alone.

We've made it through one week and done lots of learning. After this week it's supposed to get a lot easier. I know her wound is itchy, she keeps trying to lick it through her collar, but it's closing up nicely and the scabs are almost off it. Once that's healed the infection risk is I think gone, and I'll be relieved. The other risk is the plate holding on the end of her bone snapping (!!!!!!) which I can't do anything to tell how it is, just look at the joint and marvel. She's starting to put some weight on that leg already though, a bit limpingly, but it's happening, and that's what the vet wants.

Soon she'll be putting more weight on that leg than the other if all goes well, because it will hurt less than the still-torn side, and we get to go through it all over again with the other leg but with a lot more knowledge and understanding of each other.

It's good timing. It's a good time for me to be immersed in caring for one of my pups, just when I'm reminded how precious they are, and when a distraction isn't bad for me at all. It's a good time to get to know Solly better and be astonished at her immense heart, at her willingness to do what I ask, at her ability to laugh in the face of pain and strange happenings.

Meanwhile Thea guards the outside alone, and Avallu's memorial spot in the garden turns over and over in my mind until I have time and energy to create his stone to set in his favourite place.

I had to take Avallu in to the emergency vet last weekend.

It's difficult here. There are basically no vets. There's a daytime emergency vet 2 - 2.5 hours away and no nighttime emergency vets. There are no farm animal vets, except some which do horses.

So if a dog or cat is not doing well I need to make the call early enough that they don't die in the 20 minutes of "first you need to pay for a virtual vet to diagnose and certify an emergency" and "then you need to load the animal and drive them into the vet".

I'll spare you the details but Avallu is ok. It was maybe a slipped disc and a UTI compounding each other? But I was afraid. He loves me so much and wants to do what I ask, but he was in a lot of pain. Loading him was rough.

The vets were great with him, though, and very good with my "he's dog reactive and person selective". They were polite to him and he was polite to them despite his pain, and they were adept at blocking all other dogs from his sight.

They were very busy, though. I ended up sitting in the car for six hours in 2.5AQI 200-300,mostly around the top end. That is where there's enough smoke it's hard to see the end of the street, and ash accumulates on the car in a visibly speckled layer over six hours. I'd left without a mask so by the end not just my throat, sinuses, and eyes were burning but also the skin on my face.

I'd also left in "shoot the neighbour's home, better cover up when I step outside to look at the morning" booty shorts, without putting on real pants. They show the bottom of my tattoo, which I think invited a young woman to give me a card and invite me to her church.

Oh well.

Pup is feeling better on painkillers, though he's noticably whiny when they wear off. He's moving though, and able to lie down, even on hard surfaces. He's also taking his pills well when they're encased in duck confit.

It's been a long time since I felt that level of adrenaline in my body. Over time, living here on my own, I've been allowing the barriers that keep me functional to wear down. I'll let feelings make me stop, let them alter my behaviour. Maybe I'll hug something. Maybe I'll cry. Maybe I'll go be curious about something. That all seems to be at the expense of calm, quick, measured behaviour in an emergency, though. I am not ready to lose Avallu and it took me a bit to get myself together when it became apparent there was a problem.

Money played into that too, but that's a different post.

Anyhow, pup is home and very loved and is not in big danger.

I've always known that birth comes only out of death
Rebirth
After dark times.
So much of my life has
Felt like
Been
Dying. So many moments
I walked into death
And out the other side
Into what lay beyond. New.
Newly born.

Never before have I asked,
If I'm on a machine
Bring my dog to me to kiss me one last time
And turn it
off.

Never before have I asked,
Let my stuffed animal,
The only object which has stayed all my life,
Let her be with me at the
end.

There's no immediacy
Not the pain I always walked into
Born young and young again
Just the obscuring swirl
Of muddied waters
That drop their silt so far out at sea
I may never see them clear.