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Breeds Canine health - Zoomies

Scratchy's dream

April 19th 2010 07:44

The thing about recovering from a broken leg, procedurally speaking, and I shall try to keep the technical terms to a minimum, is that you need cushions.

I speak from experience. It might have looked attractive out there on the front verandah in the sun ...

... but comfortable it was not.

Time to give that away.

The thing is, not just any cushion will do.

This one, for example ...

... is not greyhound-friendly. It takes approximately seven minutes to get down when you have a broken leg, so it's pretty frustrating to find that the wrong leg has ended up on the cushion.

Nice colour though.

You just need a bigger cushion, you clueless canine.

What? Oh. Hmm.

That's better! What luxury. Everything off the floor. I can say with certainty that nothing could be better than this. I do believe I'll close my eyes now and have a nice snooze. I wonder what I will dream about.

Zzzzz ... oh, a bone on my big cushion. Why didn't I think of that?

Zzzzz ... oh, two big cushions. Why didn't I think of that?

I suppose a bone and two big cushions is out of the question?

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Greyhound, Canine health

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Scratchy's diary: A snapped tendon, a broken leg and short rations for breakfast

April 9th 2010 07:40

We have had better days. It started poorly when the Big Boss woke with a headache and a dry mouth. He drank too much red wine last night while entertaining vegetarian visitors. He doesn't mind cooking vegetarian, and last night's roast pumpkin and feta quiche won rave reviews, but the following morning he always feels meat deprived.

I don't know if it was the hangover, the dry mouth or the flesh famine which caused him to spread less than the usual amount of margarine on my regular morning slice of toast, but I wish he wouldn't take things out on me.

The Big Boss then took his foggy head to work, and Little Boss took us to the park. That's when things took a turn for the worse. Literally.

We had done the sniff (five cats had visited the park overnight and two dogs and been there shortly before us this morning) and it was time to run. Short Black took off and I turned to sprint after her. Bad move. Something went snap.

The only thing to do in a situation like that is scream, and I did so with with every fibre and unsnapped tendon available to me. It scared the daylights out of Short Black, who tried, in a display of deep caring and concern, to attack me. Little Boss quickly stopped that.

The pain, I worked out, came from trying to put my right rear leg on the ground. So, thinking my way through the problem, I fell over. Immediately, I felt much more comfortable.

Little Boss wasn't feeling comfortable, however. "I need help," she muttered, and I could sympathise. I am, I admit, no longer at my racing weight. Big Boss has picked me up once or twice when I've been reluctant to get in the car, but his eyes bulge dangerously and he goes a bright shade of puce when he does it. It's worth refusing to get in the car occasionally just to see it. But Little Boss wasn't about to try lifting me. Even if we had the car.

Which we didn't. And we were more than a kilometre from home.

Little Boss needed help, and looking around, she spotted a guy sitting on the balcony of his second-floor flat overlooking the park. Watching us. Little Boss looked at him. He looked back. Nup. Not the helpful type, that one.

So I stood up. It was brave, I know, but what else could I do? I didn't know, at that stage, what was wrong, but I knew very well that I couldn't put any weight on my back right leg. So I set off for home doing a three-legged shuffle. Slowly. Very slowly. Very, very slowly.

At this rate, although dinner was more than 10 hours away, we weren't going to make it home in time.

Two women came to the rescue, one passing by and one in her front yard. They both looked concerned and started talking with Little Boss about the problem. It was suggested that I wait in the front yard while Little Boss went to get the car. Good idea, I thought, and happily fell down again.

Back home, Little Boss parked the car and, without getting herself or me out of it, used the Little Phone to ring the vet. She described everything that had happened in detail and then went quiet for a while listening to what was being said on the other end. Then she rang the Big Boss at his work and told him everything. That's when I learned that the vet suspected I had ruptured a tendon.

Little Boss — and she has asked me to insert at this point that she was under the weather too, having such a sore throat and rasping cough that she had seen a Hooman Vet the day before — started the car and drove off.

They made a fuss at the vet, and it was not all due to my good looks. Then they stuck a needle in me and the lights went out. I heard later that they had to anaesthetise me so they could get my hurt leg into the right position to take X-rays. They needed X-rays to confirm the tendon rupture, and give some guidance for the surgery which would be required to repair it. They also wanted to make sure I hadn't done any further damage, like breaking my leg.

The X-ray confirmed the tendon rupture. And a broken leg. "Quite nasty" is how the vet described the break.

Now it's late afternoon and I'm home and I can tell you that I'm busting. They have put what the call a soft cast on me, and I can say with confidence that it's primary purpose is make it impossible to get into a position to pee. Or poop.

I was standing, pondering the solution to this problem, when I fell into the garden and couldn't get out. It's just one humiliation after another. And it's still more than an hour to dinner time.

We have had better days.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Greyhound, Canine health, Scratchy

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Cone call

January 14th 2010 21:05

Part 2 of the story started yesterday: Halo from hell

A dog cone collar, also known as an Elizabethan collar or a space collar, comes in a variety of sizes and colours. Some have padded neck areas for extra comfort, some are fully padded for extra status, and you can buy special stickers so the kids can get involved.

There is no name, model, style, colour or decoration, however, which has ever won approval from a single dog or cat.

Late on the first day of Scratchy's one-month sentence of wearing a cone collar, he negotiated his way out the door into the backyard. He took a deep-breath of sweet evening air foully scented with plastic from his cone collar, and decided to walk around the side of the house. This narrow alley, barely wide enough for two greyhounds to pass each other, is Scratchy's favourite toilet spot.

I don't know how long he stood there, unable to turn around because of the huge cone on his head, before I found him and helped him out. That's when I decided to find an alternative to the cone, which was disturbing me almost as much as it was clearly disturbing Scratchy.

We have in our household a pair of ladies silk pajamas. Of the softest texture, and the softest sky blue, they were bought many years ago in Hong Kong's famous Stanley Market, and served their mistress faithfully. I found them in the laundry, in the rag bag.

I cut about six inches off a trouser leg. I slipped this over Scratchy's wounded leg, wrapped the top end of the silk tightly just above the knee, and secured it with a liberal application of medical gauze.

We now had a covered wound, meaning Scratchy couldn't lick it, but open at the bottom, which means air could get in.

He's been wearing it for two days now and, while he's had a little nibble at the gauze, he hasn't been able to undo it, and he hasn't been able to get at the wound, which has dried out and is healing nicely. Scratchy shook his leg a few times initially when walking, but has become used to it. He even wore his blue silk leg skirt to the park this morning, and acted unfazed and indifferent when Daisy sniggered.

The plastic cone collar, meanwhile, sits discarded in a corner of the shed. I hope I never see it again.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Greyhound, Canine epilepsy, Canine health

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Halo from hell

January 13th 2010 21:55

The vet gave it a long name in an even longer forgotten language, but I can't remember the term. Basically, it describes what can happen to a skin graze if it doesn't heal. "And it won't heal," said the vet, "if the dog keeps licking it."

What happened to the healing power of a dog's tongue? Don't you hate it when science disagrees with anecdotal wisdom?

If Scratchy keeps licking his leg, the vet said, it won't dry. And if it doesn't dry, we run the risk of granulation. That, in turn, can lead to some nasty complications. And, as luck would have it, there is no wound more prone to granulation than a leg wound.

"So we need to bandage it," I said, showing the veterinary instincts which I had first felt so acutely in primary school.

"No," said the vet, "because we need the air to get to it."

"So we need a course of antibiotics," I said, confident I had it right this time.

"No," said the vet, "because it's not infected."

The thing about bandages or tablets is that they are relatively easy on everyone. Now a horrible thought came to me. "Not the ... whatchamacallit?"

"We need to stop him licking it, which he's probably doing because it's itchy," the vet continued, "and the only way to do that is a cone collar."

I've had experience of these things. I'm haunted by the look of bewilderment dogs and cats give you when you surround their heads with a flaring ring of plastic. "How can you do something so unnatural to me?" their accusing eyes say. A halo from hell.

The vet asked the nurse to get one from their store room. Size large. Back at the reception desk she put it together for us. Queues formed. Dark mutterings came from the nurse as she wrestled with the plastic tabs and slots. "Buggers of things to put together," she hissed.

And then we put it on Scratchy.

I couldn't even comfort him by saying it wouldn't be for long. "He'll only need to wear this for a short while, won't he?" I had said. "No," replied the vet. "About a month."

Tomorrow, Part 2: Cone call

images: http://ihasahotdog.files.wordpress.com/, wikimedia.org, fetchingdogcollars.com

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Greyhound, Canine health

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The end of an epilepsy tale

January 2nd 2010 00:56

Every day, as the evening shadows lengthen, as the birds settle into their nests and families everywhere gather after their day of work, Scratchy chases his tail.

It is one of the two things he does to remind me that it is dinner time. The other is to stand and stare in my direction with a direct, concentrated gaze that says, "I am in danger of passing out with hunger, my blood sugar levels are low, my bone marrow is screaming for sustenance and the clock on the wall is 37 minutes slow."

When that doesn't work, he gets bored and chases his tail. It's a desultory chase, as if to indicate that he could do better if only he had the energy which comes with a large dinner, and it rarely lasts more than a minute. Then he returns to staring at me, with occasional, meaningful glances at the clock.

Scratchy hasn't chased his tail for almost two weeks, however, since his massive epilepsy scare. During attacks, the muscles seize, and after multiple attacks, those muscles are very sore indeed. This is bad enough for normal dogs, but in the physiology of a greyhound, there is little which isn't muscle.

It is with much delight, therefore, that I can report that, this morning, Scratchy chased his tail. I assume he was practicing for a return to his habitual late afternoon tail-chasing regime. Either that, or the clock on the wall really is very wrong.

But I choose to believe that he chased his tail just because he found, after two weeks of recuperation, that he felt good enough to do something spontaneously energetic. Whatever the reason, if he can chase his tail, I can now pronounce him full recovered.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Greyhound, Canine epilepsy, Canine health

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Nightmare

December 31st 2009 02:30

We nearly lost Scratchy. It happened more than a week ago and if I haven't written about it yet it's because it was one of the more traumatic things I have seen. It was also all my fault.

Scratchy is epileptic. He had his first seizure just weeks after we got him about two years ago, and he has been on medication ever since. Every morning and evening he bears with us, in his perennially good-natured way, as we prise his jaws open and drop tablets into the back of his throat

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