The Rip Off

This past Sunday Mountain Man and I were going about our usual routine of hanging out around the house and bantering back and forth when we did something we've done a million times since we moved here. We opened the sliding glass door to let our dogs in from the backyard. No big deal, right?

Well, this time was very different than all those other times. Immediately after Tucker, our older and bigger dog, came in I noticed that he was tracking blood everywhere he walked! Oh No, my poor Tucker puppy was bleeding. I quickly grabbed him and noticed it was his back paw. He has white paws, or I should say that he Had white paws. One of them was now red with blood.

Mountain man quickly got me a wet and a dry paper towel and I gently wiped as much of the blood away from his paw that I could... attempting to find the source of the bleeding. My first thought was that he stepped on a thorn, or a bottle cap or, God forbid, some glass or something that cut the pads of his paw. But I soon found the source. It was his claw. He'd broken most of it completely off!

Back when he was just a little puppy I tried to clip his claws and I got too close to the vein on one of them and it started to bleed. It took a while to stop but as soon as it did he was fine and back to normal. This time, however, he wouldn't let me hold the towel over his wound. He kept pulling back and yelping when I tried to hold his paw. After about 15 mins (but what felt like forever) of holding an ice cube to his claw, the bleeding finally stopped. They say you can also try corn starch so we did that too, but it seemed to make it worse so we did the ice again and that worked the best.

We kept a close eye on him and realized that he was favoring his paw and wasn't putting much pressure on it when he walked. Several times we noticed him holding his paw up when he was just standing. We just figured that he was still hurting and might for the rest of the night.
But the next morning he was still hurting and favoring his paw. We also noticed that he was now licking it to the point of soaking whatever he was laying on.

So last night Mountain Man called the vet and asked what we could do. He was told to bring Tucker in for a checkup. ( I had already told him that they would say that) But they were concerned that what was left of his claw was cracked up into the skin and that's what was causing him so much pain. She thought she'd have to do a procedure and remove the remaining claw. So Mountain Man took Tucker to see his favorite vet, Dr. Love. This is how he looked when he came back home:

The white plastic around Tucker's neck is not a new accessory for doggies. It's a neck brace used for medical reasons. Dr. Love was going to put a Cone Collar on Tucker but Mountain Man thought it would cause more problems since our little dog, Pumpkin, would tease him to no end. No, not really. But he was concerned that Pumpkin would bother Tucker and hurt herself and maybe even both of them by jumping up at him while he had the collar on. So the neck brace was put on instead to prevent Tucker from licking his paw anymore. The official diagnosis is that he completely ripped off his claw and because he kept licking the nub, he infected it too! So the brace was put on.

He looked so pitiful with it on. But he isn't uncomfortable in it, it's padded on the inside and it's not tight, just awkward. When it came time to go to sleep, he stayed on the floor (he usually jumps up on the bed to say goodnight and snuggle for a bit) and we turned off the lights. Not five minutes later I heard him licking! Mountain Man turned the light on and wouldn't you know it, Houdini somehow got the damn brace off! It was still fastened together and still hooked around his ribcage (the blue strap) but it was no longer on his neck and he was going to town licking his paw.

I was nervous the rest of the night that he would get out of the brace and continue to lick himself raw while we slept. So, I didn't. Sleep. Add to that a nightmarish thunderstorm and blinding white lightening with two dogs who are deathly afraid of said thunderstorm. From 3:00 a.m. I had a small dog pressed up against my legs, shaking uncontrollably and a big dog who couldn't curl up because of the neck brace, laying sideways between me and Mountain Man, with the hard brace resting on my hip... a hip that has been bothering me for several days already. No, there was no sleeping that night.

Tucker, however, slept soundly the rest of the night (after the thunderstorm passed) and has been asleep all day. He's such a good boy though. He takes his pills like a champ without fighting me at all. But he HAS managed to find a way to lick his paw while still wearing the brace. He's so smart! So to fix that problem, we put an old sock over his paw and taped it around his leg. That with the brace on has seemed to do the trick.

Hopefully there won't be any thunderstorms tonight and I can get some sleep!
Until next time,
RW