Bionic Franken-dog!!

Riley doesn’t even need to dress up today for Halloween!  With all those staples in her leg, she can officially be “Bionic Franken-dog” for Halloween.  Hehe!  Is that bad?  Yes, that’s bad…

Riley’s “official” Halloween portrait from her pictures with Miss Amy back in June!

Franken-dog gets her staples out tomorrow!  Hooray!  We’ve almost made it 2 weeks!  Tomorrow will be two weeks after surgery.  Wow.  That time actually did seem to go by pretty fast, thank heavens!

I called Franken-dog’s surgeon’s office today to ask a few questions.  First was how long she should be taking Tramadol and how long she should be having heat on her leg.  We’re good to stop both.  Yay!  Then the next question was about how to do her physical therapy exercises and I just have to flex and extend her leg for 10 minutes at a time 2-3 times a day to prevent muscle atrophy.  Luckily, she had big muscles to start with!

Can I just say how nice the people are at Dr. Dassler’s office?  The receptionist answered my 2 calls today and was able to get answers to all of my questions and was just very pleasant in general.

Anywho…Riley has her 8 week follow-up appointment scheduled for December 14th at 9:00 AM.  She’ll get X-rays taken again (cha-ching!  $$$) and may have to be sedated for them (even more $$$).  I’m going to see if I can get a digital copy of the X-rays to post on here!  I want to see “Bionica’s” leg!  🙂

Two Days Post-Op

2 days of crate rest down, only 54 more to go!  (I’m counting Tuesday as a day of crate rest since that was her surgery day).  Riley had a good night last night.  She had to keep repositioning herself to get more comfortable, but I can’t really blame her!  I put a cold compress on her incision last night and she didn’t really seem to mind that too much.  I am also supposed to massage her leg, so have been doing that as well.  I also got to stick myself halfway into her crate and snuggle with her for about 10 minutes and get kisses from her!  Thank goodness they didn’t mess with her sweetness level while she was under the knife!

Scar pictures to follow, so if you don’t like seeing staples in skin, skip on down to the bottom!

Still a happy girl even in crate confinement!

Starting after she gets her staples removed (November 1st), I’m supposed to do range of motion “physical therapy” at home with her as much as she’ll tolerate.  I don’t see that being a problem for her, maybe for me because I won’t want to hurt her!  I’ll probably end up being too gentle, but I’ll have them show me what I’m supposed to do at the vet when she gets the staples removed.

Her knee is a little swollen, but the main thing that I can tell is swollen is actually her ankle.  No worries, that’s normal!  Anyway, I am sleeping on an air mattress downstairs in the family room by her crate at night in case she needs to go out in the night (plus she’d get lonely otherwise…and so would I!).  She had to go out once in the night to do her business and needed to go tank up on water another time (she gets a lot of access to water, I think she just got hot in the night…plus, we have a bowl that clips onto the crate door but I’m still looking around for it at the moment…sigh.).

Riley is Home from Surgery!!

Riley came home at around 11:30 this morning.  Her leg looks good from what I’ve been able to see of it and she isn’t too terribly swollen up.  She is starting to put a little bit of weight on that leg already (not consistently though)–go Riley!

You can see her in her crate kind of…it’s a little dark, but whatever.

She is being so good with keeping calm and quiet in her crate…even though Chloe is looking out of her favorite perch at the front window!  I just fed and medicated Riley and I’m expecting her to go back to sleep soon.  She was whining for a few seconds earlier but I think she was just bored.

She has a leg full of staples and is sporting a fancy new leg shaving hair do!  I’ll try to get a good pic of it later.