Update #2 - Day Two after surgery...Visited with Lili again today....considering how unhappy I was with the call this morning, things were better than I expected.
They'd taken the bandage off her wound and it looked a lot neater than I imagined it would. We counted twenty stitches and it looks terrible but it doesn't seem sore or anything so I hope it's healing well. She was getting a bit frustrated by trying to reach an itch near the wound site, so I hope that means feeling is coming in alive and well around there.
She's still not toileting on her own and but there's some twitching in her rear limbs and apparently that's a good sign. She seemed much brighter than yesterday and seemed a little keener to try and move a little bit more too. She was having a little try at scrambling off the table to get at some chicken the nurses bought in for us to give her along the counter top. She wolfed that down, and then ate about half a dozen milky biscuits and a piece of carrot. She wasn't fussed on the new treats I bought in for her, but I think she might want some comfort food and "tastes of home" maybe. She was very alert to everything going on around her and outside the room, and nosy as ever haha! Ears going up and down and her head tilting (I don't really recall seeing her do that yesterday) with words she's more familiar with at home - so I know my girl is still there inside her broken body.
Main thing for now is that she's bright, eating well and drinking well too. They're going to try and reduce the hard pain killers tomorrow and see how she copes. If she's not doing well they'll bump them back up but if she does okay they'll look to slowly wean her off them over the rest of the week. Apparently they like them to be off the opiates and peeing by themselves before they will even consider letting her home. Hoping that we'll get some positive news further into the week, but as always - I'm preparing myself to have to wait a while longer for that.
I'm still horribly worried to the point of being in this state of horrible numbness and "disassociation", I suppose you'd call it. Feeling sick all the time and I'm exhausted from the worry of it all, having a lot of weird health symptoms myself which I'm hoping aren't anything serious and I'm putting it all down to stress and anxiety right now. I managed to drive there today, rather than taxi-ing it, so I'm very pleased with that and hoping everything will hold up well enough to allow me to keep doing that for as long as I'm needing to.
I'm feeling more and more confident in her being there, as they're taking good care of her and she is most definately in the best place, but my God, the house isn't a home without her in it. It's weird being able to go to the toilet by myself without her busting the door down to find me, or getting her coming up and chirping at me when it's dinner time haha!
Anyways, here's a picture of her from today. I think she looks brighter even compared to yesterday. Big thanks again to everyone offering good wishes, support and advice. You guys are the best and all the nice messages are really helping me through this.
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@Darwin - Ah, I guess my visits to Lili are filling in the blanks for what may have happened with your boy on the first two days then. I have a worry that she might start getting distressed when we leave as she starts to get a little better. She was looking around a lot more today than she was, so I can see it possibly happening.
Yep. I'm trying hard not to put too many expectations on her. It's very early days. We don't know what time the operation happened exactly (sometime between 2pm when the surgeon got to the clinic and 7pm when he called with news) so it wasn't even 48 hours when we saw her today, and it was a massive operation. Three hours under aesthetic is huge for a person, I imagine it's so much harder on a dog. If I'd been through what she had, I don't think I'd be up and about either so I'm trying to think of it that way.
Considering how quickly it feels this year has gone, six months seems like nothing but at the same time, how slowly these last two days have gone I imagine it's going to seem like double that.
I wish there was some kind of "checklist" that you could run along and compare with, but like you said - they're all different. Even the surgeon said yesterday that some dogs do very little at the start then progress practically overnight, then some show initially positive signs and seem like they've got it in the bag and plateau before they're anywhere near where they need to be. I need to remember she's doing it her way, and just hope that taking it slow will mean a full recovery, even if it's not such a quick one. All we can know for sure right now is that if love could fix her, she'd be home by now.
I can't wait to hear the words "clinically discharged" but by the sounds of it that doesn't mean the fight is anywhere close to being over. Luckily we've got rugs or carpets in most rooms, so I'm hoping she'll do okay with getting around the house when she needs to. We've actually had some unused furniture moved out today in preparation for her coming home. I really hope that pet insurance covers the phsyio/hydro therapy, because by the sounds of it that's the most important thing. The surgery is only a tiny portion of the overall recovery.
Oh bless him! It sounds like his recovery was a real marathon for you all and I don't expect Lili's to be any different. It's so good to know that he got through it all, and that it can be done. It gives me continued hope that she'll beat this with time.
Thank you for your continued support and for giving me a rough idea of what to expect when. I'm hoping that she'll defy expectations and bounce back quicker and stronger than anticipated but I'm ready to help her fight and I'm coming up with all kinds of ways to make life at home as easy as possible for her, and me.
