Day to day

Each day follows a similar pattern in Lucy-care.

It begins with a leashed walk through the back yard for morning constitutionals. Even this trip has a routine. After a few steps off the patio (she needs to be standing in grass), she puts her nose in the air and sniffs early morning smells. Her perambulation is counter clockwise around the yard with a long stop by the worm bin to look down the alley. There's another stop at the opposite end of the yard to check out the alley in the other direction. When the loop is closed, she repeats the circuit, sometimes dissecting the yard.

Breakfast follows and consists of kibbles and cooked rice and one antibiotic. By the time we've coffeed and breakfasted, it is time for her first pain pill, plus another back yard sojourn. The morning is spent in the pen. Mostly she sleeps, occasionally she whines for attention.

Lunch time sports another trip to the backyard. When I've finished eating, she gets her second antibiotic. Her pills are wrapped in lunch meat—a little organic oven roasted turkey. Such a deal! Those pills (with enough of a meat wrap) go down like a charm. The afternoon duplicates the morning.

Around late afternoon, depending on the day, we go into the back yard for a snooze. I garden and she gets a snoot full of fresh air. Although I keep her leashed, it's not connected to me as she doesn't wander. I think she's so happy to be out of the pen that she's content to stay put as long as it's somewhere new.

She used to receive her 'cocktail ball' around 5PM. It looks like a plastic golf ball on steroids with a tube extending into the interior kind of like an enclosed bundt pan. I drop some tasty morsels in it and she spends a half hour or so rolling it about the living room in hopes that a morsel will fall out. Very therapeutic for her. However, at present this is too much activity, so instead she just gets dinner. Not bad, mind you, but not mentally stimulating either. I try to thwart the day's boredom with a stuffed kong.

She stays in her pen until after we eat dinner when she gets the day's last pain pill and then is allowed into the living room while we read or watch TV. At 9PM, she gets the last of the day's antibiotics. Eventually it's off to bed only to repeat the routine the next day. I'm going a bit batty with it, so I can only imagine how bored she is.

I had a couple of frights yesterday. Lucy is not supposed to do stairs, so our basement has been closed off since she came home from the hospital. Yesterday we'd come in from the back yard when the phone rang. It was a short phone call, but distracting enough that I realized she was 'loose' in the house. When I rounded the corner from the kitchen and saw the basement door open, I panicked. There are 14 stairs and the one thing the surgeon and vet tech said repeatedly is NOT to let her do stairs. I ran down expecting to see a lump at the bottom, but she wasn't there Luckily, she had just gone into the living room to nap. Perhaps she even knows she can't do them yet.

Then last night, in the middle of the night, I woke to her howling in pain. I don't know if it was a dream (doubt it) or she'd caught her incision at the base of the bed, or rolled over incorrectly. Lots of panting—a clue, they told me that she's in pain. Is her back okay? Are the pins in place? Is her spine tweaked? I don't know. She seems okay today, but I'm being extra cautious.