I've noticed that Lucy has been acting differently. She seems like she has not been feeling well. I took her back to the eye doctor, and she has elevated pressure in one eye. She's back on meds for eyeball pressure. The red haze in her eyes is just a normal reaction to the incisions, which was good news. But she is back to weekly visits to the eye doctor to monitor her pressure. Also, she has developed a bad case of night separation anxiety. She has always resisted going to bed, as she does not sleep in our room with us. But her fear of going to bed seems to grow with time, instead of diminishing. Research on this issue has proven unhelpful. We may need to add some anxiety meds, but I'd like to finish some of her eye related prescriptions, first. We try not to react to her crying and digging at night, but we need to get some sleep. To keep dust down, I don't want to have my pets sleep in my bedroom. I've tried letting her go free range for a few nights. I thought that if she saw that we were fine, and her bed was in the laundry room, along with Molly, eventually she would settle down on her bed. But she wandered all night. And being up all night resulted in accidents in the house. Except for our free range experiment, we stick to a predictable routine in the evenings; we try to not coddle her when she is upset, we are good pack leaders, but she is really anxious and is disrupting everyone's sleep. I hate seeing her like this. I wish she could speak, so we could talk out what is upsetting her.
I knew Lucy hated being confined, so we practiced quite a bit with her playpen. All dog and cat owners should practice some crate training. Sooner or later they break a toe, need their teeth cleaned or have a medical reason for confinement. It is good to have crate experience before pets need medical confinement. I was happy to have Lucy's playpen objections out of the way before she came home with stitches yesterday. But the first night back from surgery was still terrible. Lucy, like all dogs, hates the E-collar. It took one entire day and night of agitation before she accepted the collar was here to stay. A great deal of effort was spent by making sure she didn't slam her head into something during her protests. I really wish we had tried some practice sessions wearing the cone. She tried overnight to head-butt the plastic collar off of her head. And I was up, too, telling her to, "Cut it out. You have stitches!" Lucy is taking a bunch of medicine for the next week or so. I have a pill organizer to help keep me straight, and to avoid the, "Did I already give you your morning pain pill?" guesswork. If I gave the the pill, it will not be in the caddy. In addition to her pills, she takes three different eye drops, on three different schedules. To keep my drop schedule straight, I put Post-Its on the fridge. There is one Post-It for each dose given during the day. The left side shows Post-Its for drops which still need to be administered. The right is where I put the Post-Its for drops that have been administered. I don't want to fiddle with learning a bunch of medication names. So the bottles are labeled 4x, 1x and 2x which correspond to the number of times that med needs to be given that day.
Lastly, For animals and peoples, when you undergo anesthesia, your gut takes a while before it gets back on track. It wakes up more slowly than other systems of the body. For the next few days, Lucy is eating meat based baby food and boiled rice while her digestive system recovers. Which she loves, too. Molly took a spill down the stairs during one of our practice sessions. She was fine, but shaken up, and now she seems even more afraid of going down the stairs. the problem is that she really enjoys walking up the stairs. I won't be her personal escalator for the remainder of her life. We continue to practice the stairs, but she refuses to walk down them without encouragement and treats. Her fear is real, as is her desire to be carried around all day. I won't give in to either. I'd like to, but that usually results in an emotionally needy and unbalanced dog.
Molly runs up the stairs and does something weird when she get to the top. She looks around for a little while, then she tries to mush through the spindles. This would result in a fatal fall if she were to actually succeed in squeezing through the spindles. How could we stop this? Could she really get through? She has squeezed into unlikely spots before. Should we put chicken wire along the stairwell? Nope, we looked for the "why?" Why was she doing this? Turned out she was fine going up these stairs, but was afraid to come down them. We started going down just the first four steps...nervously. Then we tried five steps and I learned that Molly goes down stairs just like her scramble off furniture. It is a controlled crash. In order to get her to take steps, instead of just one massive self-launch, we put a treat on every other step. She needed to slow down and control her movement, or she would sail past her reward. Molly is practicing walking on stairs. She now just sticks her head through the railings to check her progress, and doesn't try to climb through. Despite the medical troubles, our new girls are angels, and trouble free. They don't bark. They are housebroken. There is no aggression or unusual behaviors. Their prior owner, despite being a horribly neglectful person, trained them to have good manners. They do not try to swipe each other's food-a rare quality in any dog, for sure. The pups do not understand commands, however, or have leash walking skills, so we have started some lessons in these areas. While trying to get their attention, we have called the girl's names quite a bit. Biscuit has been more difficult to say and is sounds like a scolding. There are a lot of "sssss" sounds, so it verbalizes as a hisssss. Not willing to give up the Biscuit, we have reassigned it as a middle name. Biscuit is now Lucy Biscuit Belly. Which caused Molly to need a longer name, too as she will not be outdone. She is Molly Minnie Muffin. |
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