Month: September 2013

Bella here…

Mom took my bandages off today and I feel so much better.  She ordered me a new chest protector, a nice harness with padding on the underside so I don’t irritate my chest when I plop on the floor.  Life is good!  Yesterday was a beautiful day here in Colorado I got to lay out in my backyard and chew on a bone all by myself.  Mom kept an eye on my from the window but I showed her I was just fine.  I even took up my “perch”, the step off the deck, and barked at a few of my neighborhood dog friends.  We don’t have many steps but the few we have I am learning to master.  Oh, I got back my second CBC results last week, everything looks good.  The doc said I was still slightly anemic but even that came up 0.5 and he said I was making new RBCs so he was happy with what he was seeing.  I’m going to keep working on that for the next time the doc takes my blood.  Ah-oh gotta go, dad is eating eggs now and he always gives us the left over yolk.  I don’t want to miss that!

Hops, wags and licks to all.  Oh, here’s a couple of pics one of us camping over Labor Day and the other just a typical day after a bone…

 

Well we had our first trip away from home last weekend.  Everyone had a great time!  Bella got to see a horse close up and I’m pretty sure after she got over the initial shock of seeing something bigger than her she questioned whether or not that horse might be her momma.

Unfortunately, just before we left for our vacation we spotted a red swollen place on Bella’s tummy.  Afraid that it might be something horrible, I was quietly panicking most of the weekend.  What started as a red swollen area, maybe 1.5 x 2.5 inches turned into an awful oozing sore in just two days.  I’ve never experienced a pressure sore (otherwise known as a bed sore) before and had no idea what they looked like.  Well, they look horrible and progress very rapidly.  When we returned home our vet was able to get her in that day to take a look at it.  He cleaned the sore and we decided to bandage due to the location and added antibiotics back into her daily peanut butter regimen.  Apparently, this can happen with they lay in exactly the same position or come in for crash landings when the want to lay down which she did for the first couple weeks after her amputation until she learned to do it a bit gentler.  When we went back a couple of days later for a re-bandage we decided to close it up via surgery.  So now our girl is sporting her bald back end from the amputation (quickly becoming a fuzzy back end) and a pink with purple heart bandage around her middle.  She is such a trooper, none of this seems to even effect her.

On a positive note, she is now completely off Tramadol and we cut her daily prednisone in half (only 20 mg), still taking her daily low dose of chemo.  She also, as of a week and a half ago, goes potty and poo with out any help from her mom and dad which I know she is very happy about.  We still keep an eye in case she needs our help (she thinks we fret too much and we probably do).  She’s our hero!  Just one month and 3 days after her amputation showing us all she is just fine.  We are always looking for the positives and our baby girl Bella has no trouble helping us remember when she looks up at us with her goofy smile and you can tell she’s thinking “wow this moment is just great!”