Here we are. It is Sunday and we are winding down from Thanksgiving weekend. I suspect that most people are taking the day easy, watching some football and getting ready to go back to work after a long weekend. That was exactly what I was doing one year ago today.
One year ago today, Ursa, my german shepherd / chow mix puppy was 6 months old, and had been in our house for about 2 months after adopting her from Pima County Animal Control. On that Sunday, my wife had decided to clean up some of the toys that a young puppy had scattered all over the yard. As she was walking across the yard with an arm full of toys, Ursa decided to jump up and grab one out of her arms. The problem was that she landed in a small depression in the yard and came down on her hind leg wrong. I think that most of southeastern Tucson heard her scream in pain as her leg broke.
We got Ursa into her crate and headed to the emergency animal hospital. We spent most of the night there, sadly it was a very busy emergency room that night. After about 6 total hours there, we were heading home with Ursa in a temporary cast that she would be in for 3 days.
We had an appointment for the next Wednesday for her to have a surgery on her leg where they would set the bone with an external fixator. An external fixator is a device that has 2 carbon fiber shafts with surgical steel screws set into the bone and attached to the shafts. It is really a pretty gruesome looking contraption, but the surgeon was convinced that it was the best route for her, and at her age would allow the bone to heal the best. Ursa was at the hospital for 2 days for the surgery.
After we brought her home, we were told that she was going to have to stay off her leg for 6 weeks. This meant that we would have to keep her in her crate when we were not home, and on a leash with us when we were. She could not be allowed to run or jump and they didn’t even want her to walk at first. Aside from the lifestyle change of having to spend 100% of our time with her when we were home, the real problem came at night. Even though she is crate trained, she really hated being in her crate and would become very loud. For the first week I think we averaged about 1 to 2 hours of sleep a night.
We talked to our regular vet about this, and she proscribed some sedatives to give Ursa before bed time, they helped a lot and allowed us 4 or 5 hours of sleep.
During the 6 week recovery, there were bandages covering the fixator to keep keep things clean, and to help prevent Ursa from licking what was going to become a very itchy leg. These bandages had to be changed out once a week, and that task fell to our regular vet. Ursa became somewhat popular with the whole staff at Rita Ranch Animal Hospital in Tucson, and on her final bandage change, they decided to decorate her a little.
After the 6 weeks in the fixator, it was time for her to have all of her hardware removed. Everything went well, and even though the hardware was gone, we had to still keep her somewhat calm for the next two weeks as there were 8 holes in her bones from where the surgical pins were installed. Those 2 weeks actually went by very fast, and even though there were times when we really didn’t know if we would survive the whole ordeal, Ursa was finally back in her feet.
We had a real concern that her spending almost 8 weeks being on a leash right next to us the whole time would cause her to want to never be away from us, but those fears were unfounded and she picked up “owning” her backyard just as she had prior to the accident. She started running and playing as if she hadn’t just broken her leg a couple months prior to that. This final image was taken the about 20 minutes after we let her off her leash for the first time in almost 2 months.
