Complications

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.