Saturday, May 29, 2021

Thumper (and Me)

 Just before Jen left for home last month, we noticed Thumper was limping. Our working theory was that, in digging into the compost bin and bouncing it up and down with his snout, he had managed to guillotine his paw and injure it. I got him some doggo aspirin, which seemed to take care of the issue. 

He would go for a few days without limping, then start again. Give him aspirin, limping stopped. Lather, rinse, repeat until this past Monday.

He suddenly became a tripod dog, not using the injured paw to walk on at all.  Aspirin did nothing. So, Friday (yesterday), we went to the 24 hour emergency vet (our regular one was booked up and waitlisted). We did the intake, a tech came out to the car and got Thumper, and home I went. 

Calls back and forth, talked with the vet. Basically, the x-rays showed no breaks, but one of the bones in the 'elbow' looked fuzzy. We didn't get the radiology report, so the vet released him, along with doggo Ibuprophen and gabapentin. I was instructed to get some Pepsid to make sure he wouldn't get an upset stomach from the ibuprofen. I was chuckling during his lecture, and finally told him that I've been on nsaids and gabapentin for quite a while, and was confident I could handle this. 


Thumper was pretty well stoned when we got home. The idea is to give him 10 days of rest, followed by 10 days of slowly bringing him back up to speed, assuming the limp is gone. The 10 days of rest is what the gabapentin is for.

So, that is Thumper, in a nutshell. 

I wound up not sleeping in this morning. In fact, I think I was awake at about 6:30 - 7:00. I gave up and got up, and started the day. Got Thump out to the back yard for a bit, then took him around the corner early afternoon. At about 2:30, I decided to go up for a nap.

When I woke up, it looked like early morning light. My phone said it was about 5:30, so I was expecting to get up and face the new day, in a while. Read my mail fiddled around on my dating site, and decided to get up.

So here I'm thinking it's Sunday AM. My phone told me it was still Saturday evening. And down the rabbit hole I went. I honestly was worried that something had happened to the internet clock, but the timeline as I remembered it didn't make sense either. I was confused. 

I bounced around with it for a while, until I realized that it was way too dark for 8:30 in the morning, even with the rain clouds overhead. It slowly dawned on me that I had taken a nap at 2:30, and a) either I'd slept for almost 30 hours, or b) it was in fact 8:30 on Saturday night.

Occam's razor prevailed, and so here I am, sharing this at (now) 9:30 Saturday evening.

I'm pretty sure this is another reminder that I don't have as much stamina as I did before my surgery. 

And, as any IFR pilot will tell you, "You gotta trust your instruments."

No comments: