Daphne is doing great! Four legs and all!

So we dropped Daff off at the vet in South Carolina on Thursday morning. The surgeon was great - looked at her x-rays, told us what he was going to do, and did it. We couldn't pick her up until this morning so we did some shopping for charity (work-related stuff) at Wal-Mart, met The Boy's dad for lunch, and then came home and chilled. It was a very quiet night with no whining :)

When we got to the clinic to pick her up this morning she was very happy to see us! She has a massive elizabethan collar on (the plastic shield around her head) and her leg is shaved. The discharge nurse told us that the pin the last vet had put in had come back out of the hip and had been poking around. She said that before the surgery you could even feel it! Yikes! They had to plate her leg with 8 screws (oh, and there's a pin from the external fixiter that broke off in her leg that the vet removing the external fixiter never bothered to mention to us). The surgeon said the bone is together and wants desperately to heal. He's all smiles about her prognosis and it's so strange to go from expecting to have a three-legged dog to the assurances that our dog will look like any other - with four working legs - in about 6ish weeks!!

Funny thing - when we picked her up the discharge nurse kept making subtle allusions to how untrained Daphne is. About how we can use this time to train her because she can put all her energy into working for us. Of course she's untrained because she is a stray and she's had an unset broken femur the whole time we've had her which makes training difficult (though we did teach her to come and be polite). The nurse also just seemed a bit skeptical about us and our ability to follow post-op instructions. Finally I realized what was wrong: she thought we were Daff's original owners and the people responsible for her first failed surgery (that failed because of poor post-op care). So I said something like, "Poor Daphne, you've only been with your new family for a week and already we have you in an e-collar for 10 days!" The nurse snapped her head up and said, "You've only had her for a week? Then who had her with the external fixiter?" And that was that - the nurse totally trusted us again.

At the nurse's suggestion we went to Wal-Mart and got a rubber bottom bath mat to put in her crate so she wouldn't slip around during the long drive home. Then, right before we got on the interstate Daphne went berserk - she was spinning in her cage but we just thought it was because the e-collar was giving her problems. Nope. A stench filled the car. She'd pooped all over her new rug. A stop by a gas station for paper towels and air freshner and then another round at Wal-Mart for a new mat later, and we were on the road back home.

I'm not gonna say she's comfy with that collar. But she sure is funny looking. And the vet says that her bones should be healed enough in 6 weeks that he can take off her physical restrictions. Which means we'll have a dog - a normal dog!! So we're following her post-op care to the letter! Physical therapy twice a day, short walks 4 times a day - all of it.

We will heal this dog!

Of course, the cats were a little surprised when Daphne arrived back. They were quite sure she was gone for good. We have two pissed off kitties on our hands!