Not a Good Week for Appendages at our House
While Echo’s ear amputation was most definitely not planned, this surgery actually was. Melody suffered a pretty bad toe injury while running in the ASFA International Invitational in the summer of 2007 where she pretty much destroyed every ligament in her front left “pinky” toe and severely dislocated the toe next to it as well. We worked with a specialist at Upstate Veterinary Hospital for about a year trying to rehab and medically manage the injury. Lots of leash walking, tramadol and rimadyl. We finally decided to amputate the outer, most damaged toe.
The morning of the surgery, Melody has some flakey bloodwork and the surgeon decided to postpone the surgery to make sure her kidneys were working fine. By the time we were ready to move forward with the surgery again, Mel’s sister Harmony became very ill and passed away unexpectedly. At the same time, Melody’s toe seemed to have stabilized and was mostly OK and not painful, unless she went for a really long walk or ran a bit too much in the yard. Coming off the heartbreak of losing Harmony, I just couldn’t bear the thought of surgery for Mel. I felt her quality of life was “good enough” so we decided to give it more time to see if the toe had sorted itself out and perhaps we could avoid surgery altogether.
Well, Monday of this week Melody must have torqued or tweaked that toe just right because she started three legging it and the foot swelled up like a balloon. I made the appointment that day for the toe amputation….and that day was today. She’s home from the vet now and pretty dopey from the pain killers. They had to rebandage the toe while I was at the vet and it looks pretty gruesome…maybe shocking is a better way to describe it. I didn’t get a chance to snap a shot with my iPhone, but I’ll post some pics tomorrow when we get to officially take the bandage off.
Here’s my woozy girl
Padded, wrapped and in an IV bag to protect it from the winter monsoon outside:
Impromptu ear surgery: $230
Planned toe amputation surgery: $550
My two girls coming through surgery and well on their way to recovery: Priceless.
Thank you so much to the doctors and staff at Poinsett Animal Hospital for all their help and expertise this week! We sure kept them busy….
