Winston seems slightly worse than yesterday. He's got a definite knot directly over where the fiber tape is and the "middle incision" is very dark. Actually his skin all around that area seems darker than usual, so maybe that's bruising?He didn't eat much for breakfast. I hoped that he'd be hungry after a night without food (normally he would be), so I offered a cup of dry food mixed with a couple of spoonfuls of canned and a little water to squish it up. He might have had half of that.
I called AMVS when they opened at 7 am and was able to get a morning appointment. Don stayed home from work and we both took him to the AMVS since we had to lift him in and out of the car. Getting him in isn't so bad, but we haven't figured out a good way to get him out. I have a spare dog bed back there, so we have been pulling that towards the edge of the hatch so that he's close enough to grab whichever half of him is closer to the edge. Don gets that and lifts him out and I grab the other half as it gets to the edge. There's got to be a better way! Winston feels bad enough that he just lays there and doesn't seem to care what we do to him.
We're using the sling to support his rear legs since he doesn't seem too steady on his left leg and just looks really uncomfortable being on three legs. I worry that he's putting too much stress on that leg since it hasn't been all that long since his first surgery. I'm a worrier anyway, so what else is new?
Up to this point, Don had been too busy (he's self employed) to go with me to AMVS. I had mentioned more than once to him that they truly seemed to care about Winston and I think Don was a little skeptical. I think he started to become a believer during this visit.
Dr. Trousdale was the first to see us. He's got a Dogue de Bordeaux (think Turner and Hooch) himself, so he loves mastiffs, and he hated seeing Winston feel so bad. He did the initial exam and then Dr. Duerr joined us. They each moved his leg through a whole range of motions and said that the knee felt stable and we were possibly looking at a soft tissue injury. They thought the x-rays that I'd brought with me looked good as far as the knee was concerned, but the hip in the x-ray looked bad, so they wanted to take another one of his hip just to double-check. They took that and everything looked fine, so it appears that there was some odd mark on the x-ray from the other vet.
Winston's symptoms and the fact that he was losing interest in food worried them, so they decided to take a sample of the fluid in his knee just to check whether there was an infection present. They shaved a small patch of hair and drew out a sample. Under their microscope it looked clear, but they said that wasn't conclusive since there could be a small number of bacteria that could be in one small area of the sample that they put on the slide that didn't happen to make it to the center area of the slide. They wanted to send a sample off to a lab to be cultured since that was the only way to make 100% sure. In the meantime they wanted to start him up on antibiotics just in case. We loaded him up and went home to wait for the lab results. They said the first results would be the next morning when the lab also looked at a sample on a slide, but the culture would take 4-7 days before it displayed (or not) the bacteria growing.
I guess if it's bad news, it will show up earlier and if it's good news they wait the full 7 days?
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