On the mend

This weekend was nothing but a whole lot of lying around with Tess. My ass was firmly parked on the couch for most of it. Which was, incidentally, very nice. The weather was cold and pretty rainy, so that made it even better.

As I blogged about on Friday, Tess was pretty drowsy after coming home from the hospital. She was pretty out of it, glassy eyed, etc. so she spent most of the evening sleeping (when she wasn’t making her incision bleed.) We were happy to cuddle her.

On Saturday morning, she scratched at her incision again (only like one or two swipes), and she actually popped the knot right out of one of her stitches. We decided a cone/lampshade/Elizabethan collar was in order. Michael drove to the vet to get it, and the vet techs on duty for the weekend refused to give him one because they said with a neck surgery, it would actually interfere with her incision. They said we needed to bring her in to have them figure out a way to keep her from scratching them.

We were pretty furious about this because the vet tech I had checked out with on Friday told me that we could just come by and get one if we needed it. If I had known then that I would have to bring my poor, traumatized dog back to the vet in order to get one, I would have refused to leave without one in the first place.

So, we were forced to load Tessa in the car with us and drive to the vet. The poor thing absolutely freaked when she saw that we were pulling into the vet’s office. When we walked in the door, she actually let out a little cry that was enough to break my heart. Luckily, upon seeing her, the vet techs agreed rather quickly that a cone would actually work (thankyouverymuch), so after putting it on her, we were able to leave pretty quickly. We then proceeded to remove the cone as quickly as possible and made every effort so she wouldn’t have to wear it for the rest of the weekend.

Once home, she gladly crashed on the couch again. We watched Armageddon since it was on TV (seriously, do movies get any more shitty than that one?).
We made dinner, I baked homemade dog treats, and then we watched Ironman.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, we realized that she had somehow popped yet another one of her stitches (the two lower ones were clearly untied). We didn’t want to pull them out, even though they weren’t doing anything, so we decided to leave them.

No worries, though… a couple of hours later, Tessa magically took care of them herself. One minute, she had the threads in there, the next minute, they were gone. No clue how she did it, but she now only has two of the four stitches remaining. Her incision looks to be healing quite fine, and the accidental removal of the stitches didn’t cause any bleeding, so we’re not that worried. Just watching her a hell of a lot more closely now that we know she’s a Houdini.

We laughed at her funny stance on my lap.

Then we crashed on the couch for the second night in a row.

This morning, we woke up and decided to take Tess for a walk. The vet said we didn’t have to restrict her exercise at all, so we figured she could handle it. We did our normal “long route,” which is probably a little over two miles. Little girl took it like a champ.

Once home? You guessed it, back on the couch. We watched Blue State, then watched the Bills lose yet another game. (Our optimism for this season is now over. I knew it’d come to an end sooner or later.)

I spent the afternoon and evening reading my book, and meanwhile, Tessa was still sleeping it off. All in all, a good weekend.

Especially for Tess. (Which was the whole point.)

I’m not looking forward to leaving her and going back to work tomorrow.