Oh boy, Week 4 was super challenging. I am glad that Gracie is feeling better, but, I think that managing her now is actually a lot harder than it was right after the procedure was done.
Making this sign is totally considered “adult behavior,” right?
Gracie is the most neurotic dog ever. One of her “quirks” is that she is scared to death of the sound our cable box makes when it reboots. The reboots ALWAYS happen in the middle of the night and (of course) this week it happened on the first night that we decided to let her crash in her exercise mansion pen for the night.
Around 4AM I heard frantic scratching and when I went to check on her the pen had been moved all around. About an hour later she finally calmed down from the evil cable box and decided that she was hungry. When I informed her that breakfast is not served at 5AM she got pissy and spent the next hour and a half barking and telling me what an evil person I am. It is probably not a big surprise that I am now sick and exhausted (the lack of sleep thing kills me).
This pen is the home base for recovery central. My house has been overtaken by this thing. I also had a mishap this evening where I fell into the pen (thereby collapsing half of it) trying to get Gracie’s water dish out. No humans or dogs were injured during this incident.
Also, on Saturday, she managed to rip up the entire pad that we were keeping in her crate to stop her from slipping on. Totally rude and unnecessary. I had even splurged on something nice and made sure that she had memory foam!
In more important news, we had our 4 week check in with the vet on Monday. Gracie got a good report and he actually wants us to increase the amount we are walking her a bit more to try and build back some muscle mass. Unfortunately, she still isn’t cleared for stairs so I will continue to carry the princess up and down them (much to the chagrin of my lower back).
Water therapy is going much better these days! I think the major issue was that Gracie did not understand what she was supposed to be doing once the treadmill started moving. Thus, she would freak out. She now has us trained to put globs of peanut butter on the front of the plastic housing while she walks.
She will totally focus on getting all the peanut butter off and once it is gone, she puts the brakes on. The process then repeats indefinitely until the session is done.
That’s where we are halfway into the initial recovery period. Hopefully next week will be a little bit less exhausting.
