My dog is limping. Seems he hurt his left-front paw or the dog-equivalent of a wrist. As best I can tell, it happened Saturday when we were cleaning the kitchen floor. The dog saw a squirrel out by the bird feeders, raced to the back door, and lost traction. It definitely hurt because he stopped chasing the squirrel for a moment...but just for a moment.
And then he seemed fine. My in-laws arrived - why else would we be cleaning - with their dog. Max & Stewie played. Everything seemed fine. Sometime between Sunday & Monday we noticed that he was limping a bit. Otherwise, he seemed great. By Tuesday, the limp would come and go. Once he started moving around, it would disappear. If he sat for a while, it came back. Sprain right?
And now, suddenly today, he's really limping. Except of course when there's something to do. Every time Stewie barks at kids, Max runs over to help. Every time Max sees a squirrel in the yard, he runs after it. Then, when it's all over, he's pathetic again. If he couldn't use it at all or if he wouldn't let me touch it, I would have taken him to the vet days ago. Instead, I'm in limbo with it. My gut tells me that all this extra activity is aggravating it. How long do I hold out? If it's "just" a sprain, then dealing with a vet trip will only make it worse. If it's not just a sprain...
For now, I'm making him hang out in the computer room with me and not letting him run around barking at stuff. It sucks for him. It kind of sucks for me.
Stupid squirrels...
1 comment:
My dog, Wong Tse, sprained his back left paw last winter. After a huge snow fall (50cm) we had a freeze and the snow was crusty enough to walk on..... well... sort of. One leg fell through while the rest of him stayed up, and that seemed to hurt him.
The vet confirmed it was a sprain, and told us to just try to limit his activity for a while (hah!) and feed him a brand of pet food with glucosamine in it (most types of Iams have it). Since switching to the food it's made a world of difference - and we can tell because we went away for a week and fed him my parents' dog food, and he was limping bad by the end of it.... no glucosamine.
Hopefully your vet will tell you something similar and the sprain isn't all that bad.....
Post a Comment