The rest (and pain pills?) seemed to have helped Winston. I stopped the Trammadol on Sunday, but gave him Rimadyl until this morning.
I guess when I think about it, it makes sense that he wouldn't want to use his leg if it was really sore. He's got no leg muscle to start with and then if we went too quickly to a 10 minute walk, the muscle would be really sore and he wouldn't want to stand on it. I can remember when I started Deep Tone (www.deeptoneonceaweek.com)... I swear I couldn't walk or sit or stand up without yelping for about a week. Then every time the routine changes, we're all sore again!
We went for four 5-minute walks yesterday and he is fine today and seems to be using his leg more normally. He doesn't totally straighten it out behind him as he walks, but he's got less of that "seat to short" bicycle action going on. He actually stood on the bad leg today for about 2 seconds to lift his leg, then went back to the horse-pee squat.
He's also doing better at home on the stairs. Up through the weekend, we only let him up and down the 7 steps once a day, but we tried twice yesterday and he seems fine. He's using the bad leg and he's no longer hopping down the stairs on three legs. I keep him on a leash to help support him and to keep him slow.
Today when we went out for our late morning walk there was a fox lying down in the yard across from our driveway. I was lucky that I was the only one who noticed him! I have to stick to the back yard when I take Winston out in the mornings. We've had a bunny population explosion this year and that seems to have caused a fox population explosion too. I'm sure that there were at least two litters if not three in the neighborhood. We've lived here just about three years and up to this point I've only seen them out at dusk, night or very early morning, but nowadays it's not unusual to run into one on a mid-day walk. They see us coming and if there's cover, they duck behind a tree or a bush and watch us as we go past. One night we ran into one where there was no cover and it just laid down in the grass and waited for us to pass by. There's one cheeky big guy (I think it's a guy) that comes over in the evenings and sits just outside the fence while Josie barks her head off at him. He's got this look on his face like he's just laughing at her.
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