It's been a while since I blogged because it has been an insane week. Last Wednesday night I was sleeping contently in my chair, in a doped up post surgery haze. With a sore belly (stitches) and a lot of pain meds in my system, I decided that it would be a nice idea to leave the patio door open so that my exceptionally trustworthy clan of dogs could come and go as they pleased instead of making me get up and hobble to the door every few minutes.
When taking vicodin, Tavia tends to incorporate all sounds around her into dreamy dream land. Suddenly my dreams turned to screaming dogs. When the screaming did not stop, however, my conscious mind began to wake me up. It sounded as though another dog might have gotten into our yard and my kids had gotten territorial, because I definitely did not recognize the sounds going on. When I got outside, however, I saw the most horrible sight. All of the dogs scattered, and there was Bunny, bloody and screaming, laid out next to the fence. Our neighbor had been weed whacking, and the weed whacker chasing they always do had obviously taken a turn for the worse. One dog in particular, who will remain nameless, had Bunny's blood all over her. The others were not involved.
My neighbor rushed over, as I could not pick Bunny up due to my belly stitches. She and Q got Bunny to the car, and we raced off to the vet as fast as we could. She went into shock on the way there. Bunny was a good, strong girl and stuck it out all the way, though. Once we arrived, the vet techs came out with a muzzle (she started snarling at everyone) and a stretcher and got her inside. They stabilized her, got her started on pain meds, and evaluated the situation. I really did not think she would live through the night.
The initial evaluation was that Bunny needed some stitches, but that the wounds were not as bad as they looked. The plan was to take her into surgery the next day. Of course I was too drugged out to ask why stitches entailed surgery, or to mention that I thought I saw her front leg hanging out of it's socket when we picked her up out of the yard. Long story short, things kept getting found. After her first surgery was complete, it was discovered that her elbow was unstable and needed additional surgery in a few days. Then the injury to her side was so severe that the sutured skin began to rot. That wound had to reopened, cleaned, and the healthy tissue stitched back together. After 7 days at the vet, Bunny came home with lots of stitches, a drainage tube hanging out of her side, and orders not to walk on her newly repaired leg which contained a prosthetic and a bone something or other.
More on my million dollar baby's recovery later in the blog.
