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!
Bless her. I hope she is doing well now.
Gosh I’m so sorry you guys had such a difficult recovery, but I’m reallly glad you are sharing this with the world because every story, difficult or not, is there to help other pawrents just going through the Tripawds journey.
Hmm. I can’t get your video to play but I think that’s my browser issue. I will tell you though that if you want to save storage space on your free blog, first upload the video to YouTube, then paste the video URL into your blog post, on it’s own separate line. That will embed the video into your post so everyone can see it. Make sense? Let me know if not OK? We are here to help.
Thanks again, I’m so glad she’s doing better.