Winston has been a little lame this week but not too bad. I stopped the Rimadyl on Tuesday (10 weeks post-op), so I guess it's not that surprising. He seemed worse today but we had a snowstorm and I've noticed that he gets sore when the weather changes.
I woke up at midnight by a loud crashing noise. I thought a kitchen cabinet had come off the wall. I wondered if it was a dream until I heard Don say, "Are you ok?" My heart just about stopped and I ran downstairs to find Winston at the bottom of the stairs and Don said that he wouldn't get up. I tried to get him to get up too and he wouldn't move. His right knee was swollen, so we both thought that he'd trashed the repair.
This was bad. We'd just had to pay a large tax bill and didn't have any savings left. I called the animal emergency hospital and told them what happened. I asked them what they would do and they said take x-rays and make him comfortable and that they'd want to wait until Monday and have the surgeon look at him. I knew that we wouldn't get out of there for less than $500. I still had Trammadol left over from both surgeries so I asked them if I could give that to him and take him to my regular vet in the morning for the x-rays. They thought that sounded like a reasonable plan, so I gave him the Trammadol. Don and I both slept on couches downstairs so that we could hear him the minute he moved. He stayed at the bottom of the stairs until very early morning when he stood up on three legs but refused to go up the stairs. He's never been on 3 legs before so he didn't seem to know what to do, or even whether he could trust his left (first surgery leg).
Don and I ended up carrying him (very awkwardly) up the 7 steps to the "lobby" of our house. He needed to go out to go potty, but it was very slow going and he was barely able to hop on three legs, it broke my heart to watch him. I had an awful feeling that we were going to have to put him down after all we'd been through with him. Don kept telling me to just wait until we got him checked out. We were able to get him squeezed into a packed schedule at a nearby vet. Don and I had to lift him into the car and then lift him out again. There's no way he could handle walking on a ramp. The vet's office asked if we could leave him there for the afternoon so that they could take the x-rays and then meet with us afterward.
The vet wasn't familiar with the Tightrope procedure, but said that his x-rays looked ok to her, and that it seemed like it was all soft-tissue damage which she thought was a good thing. We all looked at the x-rays together and since I'd seen the good ones taken at 8 weeks, I was the only one that had something to compare these with. I could see that the toggles were at the ends of the bone tunnels, so I had to agree with the vet. This is my lesson to ask AMVS for copies (on disk) of Winston's x-rays so that I have them on hand to take with me if something like this happens. I asked this vet for copies of the x-rays so that I could take them with me when we saw the surgeon on Monday. We also got more Trammadol to tide us over until we saw the surgeon (I think they only gave us enough for Sunday and Monday to make sure that we got into the surgeon on Monday).
Winston still seems really hurt and wasn't too interested in dinner, but ended up eating most of it after some encouragement. We've got two beds set up (his orthopedic bolster bed from Drs Foster and Smith and also a memory foam bed that we got for $30 at Sam's Club) down in the lobby and we've got baby gates across both stairways. I'm sleeping on the couch at the top of the stairs so that I can hear him get up when he needs to go outside.
No comments:
Post a Comment