Puppy Update

Well, I suppose this is the reason that you shouldn't get a small dog when you have small children...especially a willful small child. I know that small dogs mean small bones and I opted to believe that my dog would go through her life unscathed because I would protect her the whole time. Well, at least I believed that Nikki would stop picking her up and carrying her around. I was wrong and now I have a gimpy dog.

The basics are this...Cole and I were upstairs to apply a band-aid. We were upstairs for (maybe) 5 minutes, when we heard an awful yelping from Madison. We came downstairs to discover that Nikki thought it would be fun to pick up Madison, get on the 2nd step up, and then jump off with her in her arms. Naturally, as often happens with a child's ideas, this did not go well. Madison had a broken rear left paw. This happened on Sunday, December 3rd, approximately 7:15 p.m.

Sunday night for me was spent at the Animal Emergency Clinic for 3 hours before the vet I was paired with told me the surgeon would look at the fractures in the morning. I saw the X-rays and she has "severely displaced fractures of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th metatarsals". Monday morning came and I got the news that they want to do surgery because her bones are so tiny. This involved hours of anesthesia, cutting, pins - not a pretty picture for a human in that predicament. Did we forget she's a dog?. Had it not been so crazily expensive, I would have preferred this method; as it was, I was already groaning about how much this dog was costing me at this moment in life and wishing I had been counseled to purchase animal health insurance (given the size of the dog, I would think it would be recommended).

Anyhow, I go with the "splint" method, which is actually a cast and now Madison, my girl dog that I swore would never wear anything pink, has a cast on her back leg, covered in pink compression tape. If the injuries weren't so serious, I think I would actually see the humor in watching her run like crazy with this enormous pink cast on her leg, but I'm concerned that she'll displace something by running around too much. And the discharge papers (yep, just like a regular human hospital) indicate that I am supposed to keep her activities "restricted...for 6-8 weeks" while the fractures heal.

6-8 WEEKS??? Are they serious? I can't sit still for 6-8 hours and I'm supposed contain an energetic 3 month old puppy for 42 days? Needless to say, this is not a pleasant experience. On top of that, we get to go to the vet every week to ensure that her bones are healing well and that there isn't an infection under her cast. There is a possibility that she could be healed well enough in 4 weeks, so if that happens, that will be a GREAT New Year's gift to us.

We'll keep you posted.