Vet

Guess I should give a little update on Mags, our "first born."  She had that ACL surgery the end of June and one leg healed up great.  The other (the one that was giving her the most trouble intially) just wasn't getting better.  There was a lot of fluid build-up under the incision and she wasn't walking well on it.  The vet said there was a joint fluid leak and the stitches weren't going to heal unless we could get it under control.  So we took her in every week for a shot that would make the swelling go down immediately and she'd be good for about 3-4 days until it'd swell again and she'd limp around.  We finally went to a steroid to try and get it to unswell for longer than just a few days.  The side effects were awful, increased appetite and thirst.  She drank sooo much water.  Which meant increased potty breaks too.

I finally pushed him to put a surgical drain in to keep it unswollen so it could heal.  He called after the surgery on Tuesday and said that she was fine, but when he got in there, he realized her knee was dislocated!  All the joint fluid had stretched out the joint capsule and her knee cap had slipped.  So my poor puppy had been walking around on a dislocated knee for who knows how long!  It had stretched out her ligaments so he had to go in a cut all the ligaments, tighten them and restitch them, then he scoped her knee, put a notch in the knee cap and reattach it and make it all nice and tight so it wouldn't slip again.  He didn't even charge us for the surgery since he felt so bad and the first one hadn't fixed the problem.

It's only been a few days but the recovery has been rough.  It was awful dropping her off, I could tell she was scared and I cried the whole way to work.  I told Dallin I should have made him do it because it was not good for a pregnant woman to do.  He did pick her up and she just looked so miserable.  Friday was by far the worst day.  She didn't want to eat or drink, Dallin had to pry her mouth open and  throw her pills down her throat.  The pain medicine made her really loopy and tremor head to toe.  It was awful to watch and she didn't want to even walk on her front paws.  Once that wore off she seemed to be a bit back to normal.  He leg is now swollen all the way down to the paw at about three times the size of her normal leg.  And the bruising is all over and purple.  We have to help her walk around as she won't put any weight on it yet.  I'm hoping she starts getting better fast and soon.  My poor, poor pup.

Post-edit: On our way back from Park City today my mom called and told me they'd be home with Maggie soon; that they had had her at the vet with a leg infection.  She hadn't been acting herself and her leg was super swollen and today is was even more swollen and hot to the touch - sign of infection.  The dear vet met my dear parents after-hours, on a holiday weekend, to check her out and saw white blood cells and bacteria in the sample he took.  He tried to drain the leg a bit and gave her a shot of antibiotics and sent them home with two different, heavy-duty antibiotics.  Her leg has been oozing a bit and she seemed pretty chipper this afternoon and ate the most food she has in days.  We put her back on a lower dose of pain meds and she konked out.  The leg is swelling again (all the way down to her toes that look like sausages now) but the meds should kick in and see significant improvement in the next 24 hours.  I felt so bad they missed church to take care of my ailing dog and awful that my dog can't seem to catch a break, but am also so grateful she was in great and caring hands and my nurse mom picked up on the signs of infection; something that we probably wouldn't have and days/hours can make all the difference with infections.  So we're at this bump in the road and hopefully on the road to recovery again.