You're So Lame

I've had a bit of a rough time since coming back from Nationals. First I got some kind of stomach flu my second day back to work. Of course I was up in Winter Park doing framing inspections on a busy construction site with a 2 hour steep, twisty turny drive through the mountains before me in order to get home. Most of the stairwells to the upper floors of the condo complexes hadn't been built yet so I had to climb up & down a bunch of ladders and hop in and out of windows from the roof below. Lotsa fun when you're dizzy & nauseous. Let's not even get into the joy of being sick in a porta potty on a construction site. I'm not quite sure how I made the drive back but I did. Well sort of. More accurately I made it to downtown Boulder about 8 minutes from my house. Let's just say thank heavens for rush hour traffic and I need a new hard hat. Anyway, it took me about a week to get over that and I'm finally back running at least. I'll start back at the pool next week and it will not be pretty.

Then on Tuesday Lola started limping on our morning walk. I had all 3 dogs and by the time I realized she was limping amidst all the chaos she promptly stopped and hasn't since. It was only about a dozen steps or so but still I'm one of those people who calls the vet at the first sign of any trouble. If Lola is limping she must be at a pretty bad stage of an injury and I was especially concerned that her bicep tendonitis had flared up. I pulled her from an upcoming NADAC trial just to be on the safe side. At least she had the courtesy to start her limping the day before closing.

Yesterday I drove an hour up to Loveland to get her in to see the ortho specialist. The good news is that her bicep tendon seemed fine and her shoulder joints in general were nice & stable. The bad news is that she has arthritis in her fifth toe on one of her feet and probably the other one as well. He couldn't tell me exactly what was wrong with the toe, only that there was degeneration in the joint. They would have had to sedate her to get better x-rays and given her poor reaction to sedation in the past we decided it wasn't worth the risk. Treatment would be rest & Rhimadyl either way. She also has either a disk injury or a muscle strain in her neck, again to be treated with R & R and some massage. She also has a tight muscle on the underside of her leg, sort of where her leg meets her body. He told me to massage that as well, that it's a common area of injury in agility dogs and that it's often not diagnosed. Poor thing, so many sore places but at least nothing sounded horrbily serious though I am really worried about her feet. I'm going to try to get her to an accupuncturist the bring the inflammation down in her toes and she's on 2 weeks of complete rest. I was going to schedule her for some swimming sessions but I'm afraid that will be hard on her neck. I was planning on giving her & Cody a couple of weeks of rest after nationals anyway as a preventative thing. I almost made a double appointment to have Cody checked out as well but I'm thinking I don't even want to know what's possibly up with him. I was tempted to ask the place if they would give me a punch card between all my crazy dogs that have no respect for their bodies. I can't wait to see what Strummer comes up with, he's the worst of all.

The vet thought Lola would be fine by the January USDAA trial she's entered in so I'm not pulling her from that just yet. After that there's nothing for 3 whole months so we'll all get a little break from trialing. We may end up doing more NADAC this year because the slatless equipment will be better for her feet and unlike Cody she doesn't seem to have a problem with it. Or maybe we'll just cut way back on trials, my heart's not into NADAC these days and I refuse to travel overnight for it. I have a slatless A-frame at home but it's been out of commission for a year because a hail storm trashed the sand/paint surface. Guess I'll be sanding and painting this weekend.

Hopefully next week will be a little more normal and I can get back to my tri training. I also want to focus on Strummer's training in the next few weeks. I'd love to have him ready to compete by this time next fall.