Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Treading Water


These pictures are from Travis' last agility trial.




Ups and downs, but generally just the same old, same old. I get the feeling Travis is starting to lose some interest in food. The only meal Travis has ever refused is ironically rabbit. Other than that, Travis has always cleaned his plate and everyone else's bowl. He used to spend a lot of time in our dog room licking bits of chicken off of crates. Not even Katie spends that kind of time on it. But today Travis didn't want his cooked breakfast. I offered him a chicken back and he ate that. Since then he has eaten his cooked meals. I stopped adding veggies and will add tastier proteins like turkey, eggs, cheese, etc. Hopefully that will help. Other than that, he is mostly unchanged I suppose.




Poor Katie is hobbling around. I feel terrible for walking her in with a sore toe only to make her walk out very lame. But in the end, I think this will be best. The current pain will be short lived where as a dislocated toe would have been a chronic problem. I changed her bandage today and the surgery site looks very good.




My complaint for the day is that vet hospitals really suck at bandaging. I'm not sure if bandaging is skipped in vet school, but I have never been happy with the wrap my dog comes home with. In the future, since I am good at bandaging, I'm tempted to save $20 and just have the hospital tell me what time to be there with my supplies and I'll just do the bandage myself. I don't think I would be annoyed if I wasn't charged extra, but since I'm charged ~$20, I want a perfect bandage. And if anyone from my vet hospital reads this, I'm not picking on you.... I'm picking on all vet hospitals. Kudos for at least making it easy to take off and redo :-).




Bandaging 101



1. Do not shave an area you are going to place sticky tape to. Vet #3 did this to Travis where he had the catheter. OUCH. I'd rather the tape pull off some hair rather than a layer of his skin. Seriously, it looks like someone sand papered his bare skin.



2. Do not use sticky tape as your primary bandage. I love elastikon, but the stuff is hard to remove if you use too much of it. Just use enough to stick the bandage to some fur, so the bandage will remain in place.



***Kudos to my vet for not using too much sticky tape on Katie.



3. Its not a bad idea to first cut your piece of sticky tape or elastikon and stick it to your shirt. Let it pick up some lint so it isn't quite as sticky. It feels much less like a wax job to the dog when its time to remove it.



4. Cotton should be placed between the toes. I do not want my dog to be in anymore pain than she is because her nail is stabbing the toe next to it.



5. And for doG's sake, for $20, I don't want to see any wrinkles or flaps. I want it to appear as though an expert (or myself :-) did the bandage.



That wraps it up for me!