TPLO Day 13

Poor naked Jedi! I felt bad for him today, given that he is missing hair on 25% of his body. It was in the low 30s when we walked this morning and never got above the low 40s today. I'm sure he was fine and doesn't care, but I have to believe that the cold has to make the leg ache. I know it never helps my arm with the hardware in it. I didn't put his coat on for a quick potty trip after dinner and it seemed like he was hesitant to put his leg down again after he peed. I made it up to him with a hot pack treatment to the leg when we got back inside. Of course I'm freezing and am heating up the house with the fireplace. Jedi is camped in front of his fan like usual.

I still haven't gone after the crusty bits around the suture line. That's on my list of things to do, along with a much-needed nail trim. Our routine is normally to do nails outside, though, so that definitely wasn't happening today. Grooming-wise, Jedi is just a hot mess right now. He dislikes brushing so much, though, that I haven't yet tackled that. That poor bald spot on his butt is going to take forever to fill in....

It was quite windy last night, so I put away the pool noodle cavaletti that I had left out from the Monday class. Today I replaced it with 5 jump bars. These are obviously heavier and move around less than the pool noodles, but also have a lower profile so that he doesn't have to raise his leg as high to step over them. It might be a good idea to cut a slit in the pool noodles to slide them over the jump bars at some point to increase the height and difficulty.

We also included more hip sways in our PT routine. Maybe tomorrow I'll start to do 3-legged standing. I'm mostly just looking for ways to get Jedi to put more weight on the bad leg while standing. He seems fine while walking, but continues to offload weight while standing. It's shocking how out of balance his two leg muscles are already. I'm sure a lot of what I'm feeling is all of the hair on the left leg, but there is definitely less definition in the right leg. It's amazing how quickly that can happen. I have Jedi on a supplement called Myos that is supposed to help prevent muscle wasting, but I probably should have started him sooner. He also just started something called Ligaplex II that is supposed to support ligaments and hopefully keep the other one from going.

Here's our walking video from today, complete with winter coat! (Link for mobile: https://youtu.be/H1pNSEJNiAs )