TPLO Day 7

 

 

We made it a week! Today seemed to be a good day for Jedi. I changed things up again for my walk with Ren & Secret this morning and it seemed to work. Once again Kaiser went into the crate next to Jedi, and I put up the crate screen to block their view outside through the patio door. I gave Jedi a non-frozen lickimat with peanut butter and canned dog food, and then I took Ren and Secret out the FRONT door instead of the patio door. Maybe this worked better for him or maybe Jedi is just accepting things, but when I checked in on him with the camera he stayed settled the whole time. After he finished the mat he just laid down.

 

 

The suture line is looking good, especially that top part right at the knee. I got distracted by work stuff following one of our PT sessions this morning and stuck him back in the xpen without his collar on, and when I looked over there a short time later he was licking at it. So I guess that answers that, we're not ready to get rid of the collar yet. I put him in the cone during my class tonight just to be safe.

 

Today we officially started our five minute walks. We did three of them, and they pretty much consisted of walking down the front fence line and back, followed by a couple of trips up and down the driveway. Jedi has always been terrible on leash and I am concerned about the amount of pulling he's doing. Surely that must put pressure on the hind legs, right? I may have to pull out the head halter to walk him in for a while. That said, he seemed so happy to have a change of pace in his boring daily schedule and also seemed to sleep a bit more today.

Finally, we actually seemed to make some progress on his hip stretches today! For the most part he's still defaulting to clutching his knee into his side when he lays down, but I was able to get him to stretch it out several times today. The main struggle now seems to be his desire to just roll around on the rug on his back grunting. I mean, he does tend to stretch out his leg when he does it, so there is that, but I think he's just trying to get out of PT.

Our medication schedule is bonkers these days...

Breakfast (6:00/6:30 a.m.): Deramaxx, Cephalexin, Trazodone
8:00 a.m.: Gabapentin
9:00 a.m.: Phenobarbital
2:00 p.m.: Gabapentin
Dinner (5:30/6:00 p.m.) Cephalexin
8:00 p.m.: Gabapentin
9:00 p.m.: Phenobarbital

If nothing else, Jedi thinks it's pretty sweet to get canned food 7 times a day... I feel like he's getting practically nothing at dinner time to compensate. It will be interesting to get his weight at the next vet appointment. I took more off of him than I was expecting before surgery, so we have some wiggle room.

Here's our day 7 video. Jedi is still favoring the leg in his pen, but is pretty much using it once we start heading outside. Every now and then he'll go back to three legs outside for some reason, but if I slow him down enough he'll start using it again.  (Link for mobile: https://youtu.be/GMDW0wovXoU )

I also decided to compile our first week progress into one video so that I can better appreciate how far we've come already. (Link for mobile: https://youtu.be/Fk2gtvPPgpY )