Smooth Sailing… kind of.

Today marks 6 weeks plus 1 day since Ellie had her amputation!! I’ve officially stopped coddling her and have been trying to catch up on everything I left by the wayside (not overwhelming at all…*cough cough*), but she’s still my number 1! We have had to go to the vet every week ( and sometimes twice ugh) since her surgery for clinical trial blood draws and/or her carboplatin treatment and/or PT. this upcoming Tuesday will be the last one for 3 whole weeks!! I’m so excited! Don’t get me wrong, everyone at CSU has been amazing- but you know you’ve been there too much when you and the front desk staff (of which there are several) knows each other by name.

In PT we have graduated up to more advanced stretches and exercises, most of them are centered around helping Ellie learn how to balance on 3 legs in a safe controlled manner- I keep meaning to take a little video of her doing them, but keep forgetting. the therapist also has me working on her incision site. mostly by lightly rubbing and rolling the skin on either side of the incision. We are trying to break down as much of that fascia/scar tissue as possible. Sometimes if it’s left as is it can pull or pinch which can aggravate nerves and cause pain. Only in the last week or so has Ellie started laying on her incision side (I freaked out when she did it the first time! I was so excited!) and she seems to enjoy me rubbing on the incision, she always lays back and starts to close her eyes, so it must feel good.

Not everything has been quite on the up and up, though. Last week even with being completely off all pain meds Ellie was still “dribbling” urine pretty much all day, and then started having very bad accidents two nights in a row (probably just dribbling all night) I told the vet about it and we did a urinalysis- nothing remarkable came back, no blood in the urine, her white blood cells were barely elevated as of Thursday morning the 27th. Unfortunately I didn’t get these results until late Friday afternoon. I was getting really concerned because she had started going from a dead sleep to jumping up yelping and looking around to see what “bit” her, it seemed to be happening more and more not less and less. The vet explained that even without obvious signs from the urinalysis is could still be a UTI, but it also could be spay incontinence which is really common is dogs Ellie’s age and up. At first I was convinced it couldn’t be spay incontinence, because it was just too big of a coincidence that it started right when she also started going on all these medications, the vet gently replied that it might have been happening before but I am only noticing it now and it was intensified with the medications- fair point. So the next step was getting a sterile sample of urine for them to do a culture on to see if it was in fact a UTI and if so what bacteria it was so we could use the most effective antibiotic to help clear it up. Cool… those cultures take about a week to get back…and she can’t be on any antibiotics because it could give the culture a false negative. So there I was on a Friday evening with a obviously uncomfortable dog who was involuntarily peeing all over the house. The vet ended up offering to prescribe Clavacillin which is the antibiotic that covers far and above most UTIs, if she was showing signs of improvement within 48 hours then we have our answer, if she wasn’t we could still do the culture, but might have varied results or could look into something like Prion or estrogen replacement for spay incontinence. At first I was happy, I had convinced myself it was a UTI and this would help. Then I dug into her symptoms a little more, and it started to look less and less like a UTI and more and more like spay incontinence- she didn’t strain to urinate (when she would do it outside), she wasn’t in pain urinating, no blood in the urine. I started second guessing and actually set up an appointment with my regular vet to get a 2nd opinion, but then ended up cancelling it and giving the antibiotic a shot. It made me anxious because I’m very aware of how the overuse of antibiotics is creating all these resistant bacteria and I would hate to add to the issue even if it was on a small scale. Anyway- all of this to say that the antibiotics totally worked as of Sunday night (It’s Wednesday evening as I write this) she hasn’t had any accidents inside at all. She is also back on a very small dose of gabapentin (100mg 2x a day) I don’t know if the pain is from healing incision or maybe the UTI or something else entirely, but the gabapentin has helped stay on top of it- I’ll probably start going down to once a day and see how she does her in the next few days. I think I’ll also have to steam clean all my carpets/floors this weekend!

So after all that drama things are going great- Ellie has her 2nd carboplatin treatment this upcoming Tuesday along with another PT appointment. She has started playing around and mostly has her endurance back though we really haven’t pushed that too hard yet, but with the weather getting nice I’m excited to get outdoors more

So there’s the update! I leave you with my nearly 100 pound dog in her “stroller”, my neighbors think I’m insane, haha! If you have a big dog I highly suggest looking into Burley Bark Ranger- it’s literally the biggest one I could find, and has been a dream to use- definitely not cheap, but its not made cheap either and if you can catch it on sale I think it’s worth it (I was able to get it 25% off)!