helpful tip for a limping dog

No, this tip doesn't have anything to do with helping the dog. Well, indirectly. The tip is how to figure out which is the bad leg. It's sometimes difficult to tell if the limp is not very bad.

Here's the tip: When a dog is favoring one of its two front legs, its head tends to bob up and down as it walks because it's trying to lift its weight up off the bad leg. So the head bobs up as the bad leg touches the ground, then down as the good leg hits the ground.

Thirteen's limp was bad enough that we could tell just by looking at her feet, but watching her head bob did make it easier. Her head definitely drops as she puts down her right foot. I don't know if this works for other four-footed animals. I would imagine it doesn't help with a limp in a back leg.

Thirteen's limp is better by the way, but her pacing is much worse. The tramadol seemed to get less and less effective, until by yesterday it didn't help at all. I took her back in this morning and the vet told me that it's unlikely she would have built up a tolerance to it already. But, tramadol can in rare cases cause agitation in an animal. So it's possible that she was in less pain, but was still acting freaked out because the painkiller was freaking her out.

They gave me another painkiller for Thirteen. This one is called buprenorphine, and as you might guess from the name, it is an opiate. A schedule III narcotic to be precise. It's a liquid but luckily I don't have to inject it into Thirteen. It's still in syringes though. I'm supposed to remove the needle from the syringe and stick it in her mouth where it will be absorbed by her gums. While trying not to stab myself, which don't worry, I'll be careful about not accidently injecting myself with a narcotic.

We only have 2 days worth of it, just to get Thirteen feeling more comfortable while (we hope) the antibiotics do their thing. If her craziness the past few days really was a reaction to the tramadol, then I guess 2 days will be enough. If not, then I guess it's time for more tests. How can they tell if an animal has cancer? Would it show up on an Xray? I hope so because she's already had Xrays and they didn't see anything. She did have a couple of lumps they could feel, but they aspirated the lumps which turned out to be harmless.

I looked up buprenorphine online but all I found out so far is that it's used to treat heroin addiction. That's good to know in case Thirteen ever gets into heroin. It's also expensive. $5 a dose and Thirteen is supposed to take it twice a day. That's the vet's cost by the way; they didn't charge me any markup on it. Have I mentiond how much I love St. Francis? They also didn't charge me for the appointment today, or for keeping Thirteen all afternoon for observation. Which they had to do because they didn't want Thirteen to be alone for her first dose of buprenorphine, and I had to rush over to the HKB office and deal with a crisis. That annoyed me, I really wanted to be there for Thirteen, but once I got there and looked at the problem, I realized that I really did need to be there. The problem being that if someone places an order and their connection is lost at the precise moment the transaction is sent away from our server and to the credit card company's server, the order is completely screwed up. I thought there was a pretty slim chance of that happening. But it happened two days after the order facility went live, and some poor shmo got charged $156 more than they should have been. We refunded their money and worked out a solution, we think, but it's hard to know because we can't really duplicate the conditions of the problem.

Anyway, back to Thirteen. The folks at the vet's office put her in the "luxury suite," which means the bathroom. It's a lot roomier than a pen, has a big soft dog bed, and they put a baby gate in the door so they could keep an eye on her. But as it turned out, she kept an eye on them instead. When I picked her up they said she hadn't rested at all, but had stood in the doorway watching them all afternoon. Sigh. Only my dog would be so suspicious and fearful of strangers that you could pump her full of narcotics and she'd stand there watching you for five hours. At least she wasn't pacing.

Once we got home she lay right down. She's been resting for an hour and a half, which is the longest she's managed to keep still since Friday afternoon. So I guess the buprenorphine is working. Three cheers for opiates. I hope she'll rest long enough to let me get some rest. The past couple of days have been incredibly draining. I don't know how people manage who have to care for a sick animal or person for any length of time. They must have superhuman patience.