The bandage is starting to bunch up behind Winston's knee. I'm hoping that we can at least keep it on until evening so that it will be on three full days. It's pouring out today so I use another bag over his leg, but I'm running out of newspaper bags and I can't find the "old roll" of them left over from my paper girl days (wow... I've kept those around a long time!). I'm trying to use sandwich bags rubberbanded onto his foot, but as he drags his foot, they come right off. I use an old towel to dry off the bandage as well as I can each time we come back into the house.
Winston is getting used to the umbrella, and ignores it now. Late morning we go out again and he attempts to squat to poop. Finally! But he can't get his bandaged leg pulled forward enough to manage it, so he's half squatting on his left leg with this pegleg all bent behind him. I grabbed his leg and maneuvered it forward so that he could try to squat again. What came out of him sure didn't look natural. It was a tarry consistency and pretty bright orange in color. Hmmmmm.... At least it's a step in the right direction so I decided to not worry about it until we see how strange looking the next one is.
When we got back into the house, I tried to dry off his bandage, but after having gone out a couple of times this morning, the bottom part around his foot was pretty wet. I didn't think it would dry out all that quickly and in the meantime his foot would stay wet and cold. I guess it's time to take the bandage off even though we didn't make it to 3 full days.
I'm sure glad that I'd watched Dr. Trousdale put it on, because it helped me remove it in pretty much reverse order without having to worry about getting scissors out. I found the end of the vet wrap and unwrapped that layer by layer until I got down to the non-stretchy cotton bandage layer. It looks like an ace bandage, but it's very thin and has no give to it. I unwrapped that layer by layer until I got down to the cotton padding layer. I could see that his wound had drained a little bit, but probably only for the first 30-60 minutes that the bandage was on. There wasn't much fluid that had soaked into the padding at all, and it was all rock hard and dry.
Once the bandage was off, I figured I'd better be really careful handling his leg. Even I can tell that there's no stability there. It feels like I could just take the lower leg and bend it in any direction that I wanted. I don't see any way that this is going to heal up on its own. That really killed the small hope that I had up to this point that he'd be able to use it normally. The wound itself looks really good. It's held together with small blue stitches and it looks like a plastic surgeon had done it. It was a very fine line and all of the tissue seemed pink and healthy and as far as I can tell, it was adhering to the layers of tissue below the incision. I'm pretty pleased with the way it looks.
Winston has to wear the big sattelite dish e-collar at all times when I'm not sitting with him until we go get the stitches and staples out.
Winston isn't walking on the leg at at all, not even to toe touch. The swelling has gone down a lot, but not entirely. He seems more comfortable being on three legs now and the left leg is holding up under the extra weight now that it's not being too overburdened with a huge infected "thing" hanging off of it like it was a week ago.
His appetite is increasing a little, so I've increased the amount of food I'm offering him, but it's been so long since he's eaten normally, I'm still going to keep going slow with it. If I try to jump back into a normal amount of food for him, he'll end up with diahrrhea, and we don't need one more thing.
Dr. Trousdale called that evening to check on Winston. I told him that I had to remove the bandage that day and why I decided to. He said that it was the right thing to do.
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