Happy Birthday-Not

It's Lola's birthday plus or minus a few days and she got a rather expensive and not too much fun present in the form of a trip to an orthopedic specialist up in Loveland. On Sunday morning Jonny heard a 'yipe' from the yard where she & Strummer were probably playing and after a session of hard running out at the Rez she ended up limping by afternoon. It was a faint limp, I had to videotape it to be sure, but it was there nonetheless. I thought I'd noticed the same slight limp a couple of weeks ago and she's been gradually slowing down in agility (though this could be due to age, difficulty of courses, motivation issues, etc.) so I decided to have her checked out sooner rather than later. I went through this with Cody who had even less clinical signs of trouble and he ended up having shoulder surgery.

The 50 minute drive up to Loveland this morning brought back all the bad memories of Cody's surgery, recovery etc. It was successful in the end, Cody's doing great at 8 1/2 years but it was a whole year process that was not easy on him or me.

Of course, Lo wasn't limping today but I showed the vet the video and after a thorough exam he diagnosed her with bicep tendonitis and recommended a cortisone shot today with a possible second shot in 3 weeks. If that doesn't work the next step is arthroscopic surgery, which is what Cody had. Ugh. I was leery of letting him inject her with cortisone but he assured me that simply resting her likely wouldn't help and would take a very long time so in the end I agreed. She was so good for the vet and didn't need to be sedated for the exam (Cody, ahem, did indeed require sedation for his) or an x-ray (that was clean, phew) but since the shot was going to be painful they gave her a mix of painkillers & sedatives including the dreaded ACE drug which I truly dislike. She's lying under my desk in a zombified state that's rather disturbing but I've gone through this before so I'm pretty sure she's o.k. Every few minutes I have to look down to check her breathing which is very slow and there's a tiny moment of panic while I wait for her chest to rise then she takes a tiny breath and I know she's o.k. Frankly, I think they should have given me the sedatives.