Running in circles

Penny is healing up just fine. She gets her stitches out on the 2nd and hopefully will be told she doesn't need any more antibiotics. at $88 for 10 days, I have lots of hopes!

She is still a little picky about her food. After she quit eating her food, I bought her some Innova Evo Red Meat as some people both at work and off work had recommended it. And it rated high at Dog Food Analysis. She loved it. I bought a big bag. Then, she stayed with my husband for 24 hours while I went out with the girls and did errands. When she came back, she turned her nose up at the food. Rick had fed her Natural Balance Venison and Sweet Potato.

So, after a few days of hand feeding her the Evo, I went back to Ideal and bought a small bag of the Natural Balance. At least it's not poultry.

This may be too much info, but while she was in the Evo, her poops were much firmer than when she's eating the Natural Balance.

Penny at my feet

As I type this (after reading some reviews about Norm's Eatery and Alehouse, where I want to go tomorrow night), Penny is 6" away from my gas fireplace, staring at the flames. I am still drugging her more than I did with her other surgeries (more tramodol any way) and she's sleeping quite a bit, which I want.

There is no big news. Dr. Walker called and said that there was definitely more bacteria in the specimen that she sent to the lab and that I should reach out to her assistant to find out the results and to know that the Baytril is still the best medication for her infection.

Penny is staying at my house in her X pen while I am at work. Amber is coming to pill her and let her outside. It's nice -- it feels like I can put in longer hours with Amber coming at 2 than when I have her at Ideal during the day. I am sure Penny will get bored quick but at least she's resting a lot.

I cut off her bandage this morning. I wasn't able to keep a plastic bag on her wrapped leg and so the toe quickly got muddy and wet. My release instructions said I could cut off her bandage if it got wet or slipped, so that is exactly what I did. She was sooo good about sitting quietly while I cut it off. Good girl

Drugs for Penny

Penny is home and I'd like to say she's resting comfortably. But I don't know. She looks uncomfortable and I've decided to give her more pain killers and anti-inflammatories. She's on Toradol for a few days, which makes her woozy. And she's on Deramaxx as the anti-inflammatory.

Her leg is wrapped in a green bandage that I can take off when it starts slipping (it has) and she has a cone collar on. I took pictures but they're pretty similar to the pictures I took after her last surgery. She's in a cage, she's stoned, and her foot's bandaged.

Plate is out, she's coming home

In the ultrasound, Penny's pancreas looked slightly inflamed, but normal so Dr. Walker went ahead and took the plate out. Penny's had a bit of morphine but will be coming home, hopefully, this evening.

An infection was obvious when Dr. Walker opened up the knee. When Dr. Walker took out the plate, she sent a little piece of the flesh and a screw in to the lab to double-check that there's not another bug that's not responding to the antibiotic that she's on.

Dr. Walker wants to wait to see if Penny's eating habits improve before saying she needs to be treated for inflammatory bowel disease. Yay!

I said I'd go to a naturopathic vet for her diet before I put her on steroids. I need to do that for my little Horace, too.

More complications

I dropped Penny off this morning at 8:30 am. Not bad for a night owl. I received a call from Dr. Walker, who told me that Penny looked pretty good, but asked how she was doing. I told Dr. Walker about Penny cherry picking her food, her peeing in her bed, and looking like she was a little under the weather. Dr. Walker wanted to do bloodwork.

So, while I was working my core muscles for my little back injury at PT, Dr. Walker was trying to get in touch with me. She called my house, my cell phone, and even my husband! When I finally came back to work, I had three messages on my cell phone. I called her back and she was on the phone. When I finally got in touch with her, she had results from the bloodwork.

One of Penny's pancreas chemistry values is elevated. Normal range for Lipase is about
200 - 700 U/L and Penny's is about 4 times that amount. This means she could have pancreatitis or inflammatory bowel disease.

If she has pancreatitis, she should not be anesthetized. If she has inflammatory bowel disease, one of the treatments is a low dose steroid, which affects the autoimmune system and should not be taken with antibiotics, which she needs because she currently has an infection. So, surgery would need to happen fairly quickly so that she could get rid of the infection, quit the antibiotics, and get started on treatment.

Next step: ultra sound to see if it is pancreatitis.

Penny's next few days

Tomorrow, Penny goes back to ACCES to get her plate removed from her knee. She had developed a staph infection after her last surgery and was on a LONG round of antibiotics. Dr. Walker told me that there was a 50% chance that she'd start limping again (due to a staph infection) once she stopped antibiotics.

We stopped antibiotics and right around New Year's Day, she started favoring her foot. More upsetting: her appetite decreased and she started cherry-picking her food, having less energy, and losing some of her social inhibitions. She pooped on the sidewalk and she peed on her bed. All signs that something is not quite right in her world.

She went back on antibiotics on New Year's and I left a message for Dr. Walker or her staff to give me a call. We scheduled surgery for tomorrow.

Surgery should be simple. I'll take her in in the morning and, hopefully, pick her up tomorrow night. And, she should recover fast and be good as new soon.

Amber, from See Spot Run, will visit her every day this week. I don't know when she'll return to Ideal.