Our Dog is Broken

This morning started with the sound of Tachi heaving at 5:00 AM. The heaving sound quickly turned into a barfing sound. Ugh...it must be all those "treats" that people were feeding him. As we were cleaning up the mess and getting Tachi some water, we noticed that he was limping.

Greg put him on his back and started to check his feet. When he touched the outside pad of his front left paw, Tachi yelped and started to squirm. He had a cut on that pad about a week ago. We had put some Neosporin on the cut, and it looked healed over. It didn't look inflamed or red. But Tachi wouldn't put any pressure on his left paw. When he sat, his front left paw would be lifted off the ground. When he stood, it was the same thing.

Since everything looked okay on the outside, we took him to vet to have his paw checked out. The vet started to check his paw out, but Tachi was too squirmy. He had to be muzzled and restrained by both the vet tech and Greg. I guess I'd be squirmy too if someone was poking me where it hurt. The vet didn't see or feel anything wrong during the exam and recommended an x-ray because it could be fracture in his paw.

After waiting for 15 minutes, we were called back into the exam room to look at the x-ray. As we were looking at his x-ray, the vet commented that Tachi was a handful during the x-ray. Oh boy. I wonder if he's going to hate going to vet now. We looked at the x-ray, and there was no fracture. But there was a mysterious, small density at the base of his outside pad. The vet speculated that it could be an infection was developing where the cut had been, which is what was causing the pain. Or it could be a piece of gravel or something embedded in that pad. We had two options:

1. Wait it out and see if whatever was causing the pain would work itself out. He'd give us some antibiotics in case it was an infection.
2. Schedule a surgery to remove the mysterious density. Because they didn't know what they were looking for, it would be difficult to find it and could actually do more damage to his pad than good.

We chose option 1 and would touch bases with the vet on Friday for a progress report. If it wasn't better, then we'd have to bring him on Friday for the surgery. Ugh...I really hope we don't have to bring him back on Friday.

On our way home, I told Greg that this must be like being a parent with a kid who was climbing a tree, fell and broke his/her arm. The big difference is that a kid would be able to articulate what's wrong or what happened. Whereas a dog, really can't do that.

Tachi's been mopey all day and very tentative with is front left paw. Instead of following us around the house or playing with Buddy, he's just resting on his dog bed. I hope he feels better soon. =(