Month: August 2015

About a week after Maya’s surgery she started to become more active. All the drugs were finally wearing off and she was learning to move around. However this extra movement created complications with her surgical site. It wasn’t like she was running and jumping all over the place, she just went on longer walks and walked around the house more. The surgical site became very swollen and started dripping fluid. It was a semi clear semi bloody fluid and it of course posed concern. It wasn’t coming from the stitches, it came from what seemed like a tiny hole in her skin below. It was all so swollen that it was hard to the touch. Below is a picture with a tiny drip coming out.

 

I called the vet and he gave us more antibiotics and told me to give her warm compresses in the form of a warm towel pressed over the area. He directed me to make it warm but touch it to my face so its not too hot as dog’s skin is more sensitive to burning. I did this a couple times a day to help and it did a little. Here’s a picture of her with the warm compress and her favorite doggie toy helping to hold it to the area!

 

After a couple days the dripping stopped and it got better. Then it started dripping in another area. This kept going on and it was very frustrating. The vet said the swelling would eventually go down and to hang in there.

Then an area in the stitches actually swelled up and started leaking a lot. With all this dripping it was near impossible to keep the carpet clean. There were blood drips everywhere and there was nothing we could do about it.

 

I took her into the vet and they didn’t even know what to do. I was told that it could be muscle tissue that wasn’t given enough blood supply when she was sowed back together. The vet said this complication is more common in dogs with a lot of muscle, and Maya does have large muscles. It’s hard to stitch the big outer thigh muscle to the small inner thigh muscle and get enough blood supply to the larger muscle. Some areas of muscle could be dying then and this would require exploratory surgery to find and cut out the dead muscle. This was very scary. He also said it could be infected but she was still on her antibiotics. The area wasn’t open enough to get a culture to see if bacteria was growing though. Basically I was sent home to just watch it and see what happens.

To deal with all the leaking fluid we bought pull ups and cut them to fit over her with a hole for her tail. She looked very cute!

We went through a couple of days like this. Then one morning I woke up and inspected the area like I always do and it was all closed up and no longer leaking! It was amazing! I was terrified Maya was going to have to go in for another surgery and all of a sudden it had healed itself. We don’t know what the initial problem was except that maybe it was infected a little bit and the antibiotics took awhile to kick in, I don’t know. I was very happy to finally see it better though!

That was the last of the leaking that occurred and she really started to heal well.

Throughout this we finally got the pathology report back. It turns out the tumor was indeed a fibrosarcoma and unfortunately was rated as a grade 3, which is the most aggressive. We were told that there’s a 30 to 50% chance of it returning and when it does it usually always appears in the lungs. But my Maya is now healthy and has gained extra time on her life. We will cross that bridge when and if we come to it.

Maya’s recovery was very up and down. She would get better and then have set backs. I was given several different medications. One was a strong dose of antibiotics, pain meds for when needed, a sedative for when needed, and a stool former as she had diarrhea while hospitalized. She also had a fentanyl patch on her skin that administered pain meds. I was instructed to take the patch off a few days later. This picture shows the patch as well as how swollen her abdomen got.

 

She was very drowsy and out of it for at least a week. She would have good days and bad days. I gave her a pain pill about once a day to try to keep ahead of the pain. One day was very bad and she couldn’t get herself situated. I tried to help to get her to lay down comfortably and she just started crying, full on whimpering over and over. All I could do was just hold her, hold her and comfort her until she finally stopped crying. It was so sad. Other days were better and she was more perky as seen below!

 

The biggest problem we had was she didn’t eat. We assumed it was the antibiotics but even when she was done with them she still wouldn’t really eat. The only way I could get her to eat was by getting wet dog food (we’ve only ever fed her dry dog food) and then I had to fed her by hand. She would not eat out of her bowl so I would scoop just a little bit of food into my hand and she’d slowly eat out of my hand. I had to feed her like this for a couple weeks until she would finally eat out of her bowl again.

I only gave her the sedative medication once and regretted giving it to her. I gave her a quarter of a pill and it really knocked her out. She barely responded to me, barely moved, and seemed like she was in a depressed drugged state for a couple days.

Her favorite thing during her recovery was to be outside. We’d go out there and lay in the grass together. She seemed more alert and more comfortable when she was outside so we did that every day.

Below is a video showing her getting used to standing up and walking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=900yv-OUp-s

The funniest thing was how happy I got when she finally pooped! She got constipated after the surgery and it took her almost a week to finally go poop! It’s little accomplishments like that that helped us get through!

The day of Maya’s surgery was April 21st. We heard from the vet surgeon at the end of the day. The surgery went well and Maya was resting comfortable. They told us she already tried walking! They also sent the leg off to pathology so we could finally know what cancer we were dealing with. We were nervous and excited to pick her up the next day.

Me and my sister went to pick her up the next day in the afternoon. We had to prepare ourselves mentally as it was hard to picture her without a leg. I didn’t want Maya to pick up on any negative feelings that I was experiencing. The vets warned us that she was very out of it and looking sad due to the pain meds. They brought her out to us and it was so good to see her! She was hopping along very slow, looking drugged and trying to figure out her new body. Here she is once we got her to the car. We put her in so that she would lay on the good side.

 

We bought her a harness to help her walk around. It was much needed and worth it.

She was very exhausted but still willing to give kisses!

 

 

 

 

She stayed with me during her recovery as my condo doesn’t have stairs and the grass for her to go potty is only 5ft from the door. Getting her from the parking lot to my place was very challenging though. She was trying so hard to hop along. We kept encouraging her and saying good girl, you can do it, come on! But she kept needing to stop and would fall in the grass. We’d let her rest and then help pick her up again. The short walk took everything she had. We finally got her inside and she passed out. She seemed very happy to be home!