Among the reasons I stubbornly resisted writing much of substance last night was that I wasn't ready to discuss at length what's going on with my dogs. Just before I started to write last night, we discovered something that Murray is dealing with that's unpleasant and I was a little sad for him. I wanted to wait to write about it until today, when he had a chance to see his doctor and get a treatment plan.
I believe I mentioned before that a few weeks ago, our neighbor put him in wheels when I couldn't. It was early in the morning, and he was sleepy, and didn't notice that he had tucked Murray's tail underneath him. It rubbed against his wheel, and over several hours made a raw spot. When he got home and found out about it, Mr S-P trimmed back all of the fur on the lower half of his tail, so that he could clean and bandage it. Murray promptly ate the bandage, and had to get rushed to the vet to make sure he hadn't clogged himself up with gauze. (Quite the opposite, we learned that ingested Neosporin has a bit of a freeing effect, if you will, but that's neither here nor there right now.) He was checked out and given the okay to go home and let the wound heal on its own.
A few days ago, I was fretting that the tail was still bald, and I wondered whether he would ever leave it alone so that it could heal and get fuzzy again. I wasn't the only one worrying over him. Mr S-P had noticed that the tail had a scab on it, and last night he was in the process of trying again with fresh gauze (we'd given it air for a couple weeks), he realized the whole thing was way worse. The tail is actually fractured, badly. A little piece of bone was sticking out. I know Murray doesn't feel much, but he does have a vague sense of when something below the dislocated vertebrae is seriously wrong. I was horrified that he might have been dealing with this for weeks, but the Mr swears it wasn't like this before. This implies the wheels got him twice in the same spot inside of a month, which I find a bit incredulous. But it's possible these were two separate events.
Murray went back to the vet first thing this morning, and the doc said what I predicted last night would be the correct course of action: he has to have his tail amputated. They are going to end up docking it very close to the base. I mourn for his glorious plume of a tail, which I haven't seen in weeks, but I think overall this will improve his quality of life. If nothing else, it will be easier for him to relieve himself, and he will drag it through his own ick much less when he is out of wheels, bouncing around the back yard. (Perhaps properly it's that there will be much less tail to drag.) It's going to change his look significantly. He'll have more of an Aussie Shepherd butt instead of a rough collie mutt's behind.
The doc is great about follow up calls, and she always calls my phone instead of the Mr's. So when she called this time, she and I had a long talk about Elsa rather than Murray, and how the current brand of pancreatic enzymes are not doing enough to keep her plump and happy. I told her how every time Elsa is in the house, she's like a shark, constantly swimming with her head down, searching for the slightest crumb on the floor, or trove of cat barf, always agitated, never calm. The vet thinks that a stronger dose of pancreatic enzymes (or even actual pancreas itself from a butcher) and vitamin B-12 supplementation could sooth the never-sated shark behavior. If increasing the dose of the kind she's getting now doesn't help, we might have to switch to a brand that costs more per month for one doggie supplement than I'm paying for two lupus prescriptions and a long-term cancer med for myself in the same time frame. Yay, dogs.
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