Took poor Craig 2 hours to get to Stirling for around a 5 minute appointment.
Her bandage is off and her leg is healing well.
The foot will most likely stay at that angle now.
And now for the hard part. The cone of shame for the next 4-5 days at least, to stop her from licking the wound.
Her face says it all… bless her. I’m saying that a lot these days!
Here she is just out of the vet. The cone doesn’t work well either big ears 😂
She has to wear that for up to 5 days and we can take it off…. If she starts to lick the wound then back on it goes, I’m afraid.
She should start putting the foot down in the next 4-5 days as well, bearing in mind she’s been carrying it for the last 2.5 weeks. It will take some time to realise she can use it. I think she used it for balance there just now.
She also just got stuck in the tree. 🤦🏻♀️😬
I think she’s trying to shake it off.
Look away now all you squeamish… though it’s not bad and hard to see in the sunlight.
The wound is healing really well.
I’m trying to get it from all angles.
She’s actually handling it surprisingly well. She just had a good licking session on the inside of the cone. I hope that helped her.
We had a slight mishap at dinner as she obviously couldn’t eat out her bowl so clever mumma thought she’d feed her inside the cone.
Nope… the food went everywhere inside the cone and I needed to take it off her and wash it all. Problem is when the cone’s off, we have nothing to hold onto, as her collar is looped through the cone.
Like everything it seems hard work at first but we’ll all settle into the new routine, just like we did with the bandage.
It’s gonna be a long night puppa.
In other news I’ve had a better outlook today. Nothing has really changed apart from my response. I’m no longer resentful, angry or sad, I’m grateful for the small things.
What is this trying to teach me?
What can I learn from this?
How can I respond differently in the future.
I’ve felt like a different person today.
Not that nasty, moany git I was yesterday.
It was like the world was ending.
It’s not.
That’s my fight or flight kicking in again, the minute something doesn’t go my way.
What a beautiful day and we got our baby girl home.
This is captioned “where’d ma daddy go?!!”
She was sooooo happy to see us. Broadleys Veterinary Hospital say she’s been the model patient and they’ve all been checking up on her. She takes her meds no problem and hasn’t been such a good girl. Sounds just like her to be honest.
She just makes everyone feel so special when they meet her. 💕
She’s ready for the off with her kinky boot on.
Here they all are when she got home. The Borders all had a good sniff of her. Calaidh sniffed all over the leg.
She should be kept to one room and is only allowed to exercise 3 times a day for 5 minutes. That is going to be so tough. We need to keep her bandage dry and make sure it doesn’t slip down over the splints. We need to make sure it doesn’t chafe her skin too much.
She’s back in on Wednesday for the dressing to be checked and will get further X-rays in 6 weeks.
Unfortunately the Go Fund Me money has not cleared and may not do so until 5th June. We never realised that. They expected it to be settled fully today but we obviously couldn’t. They understood but asked if there was anything we could do to settle it then could we. I paid £500 and we showed them the Go Fund Me page and total. That was a wee bit uncomfortable but there was nothing else we could do. As soon as the money clears we will pay it.
We’ve had lots of cuddles and kisses, she has a few tough months ahead.
It will be 3 months before she is fully healed. We postponed our 4 dogs holiday to Wales in July because we couldn’t afford to pay the balance, with everything else going on, and it will be just as well as Khaleesi still won’t be able to run about by then.
I love this next one… her face when Craig’s still making the scrunched up face look.
He thinks I’m gonna kiss him…. Nope!!
So after all the excitement of going to Stirling to get her, she is literally sleeping in the living room for now.
Taking her 2pm meds like a good girl.
I was awake at 5.15 this morning as “someone’s” alarm went off at that ridiculous time…. I wasn’t due up until 6.45am but of course, that was me tossing and turning, wide awake, thinking of Khaleesi.
Someone has been warned for future alarm events 😂
The run club met at 7am, right outside my house, and we ran 5.36km.
And I LOVED it. I run so much better when I’m not behind everyone, I love that today I was paced out front until the 3k mark. That does NOT mean that I was faster than the others, it means they ran at my pace. I didn’t stop running to catch my breath until 3k in, which is my best yet. I need to work on my head chatter when people are in front of me. I need to stop the negative committee telling me how slow I am.
I love love loved it.
Here are Emma and I rounding the bend. (Should say here that Claire runs on ahead to take photos and then catches up without looking like she had to try!)
Now there’s a guy doing a 24 hour lawnmower push around Beith, to raise money for Cancer Research. We were lucky enough to bump into Grieg of Greig’s Garden’s on his challenge!!
The second time this week asking for donations but if you click on the link to his FB page you’ll be able to donate. He apologised for being sweaty but quickly realised we all were too! The photo shoot will have affected our time as didn’t turn Strava off… check me making excuses for what was, a fantastic time!
I took Calaidh up the hill when I got home but forgot my phone. She looked so cute running through the long grass but we’ll needed to check her for ticks.
So nothing else for it but some sunshine in the garden this afternoon.
It’s a really beautiful day.
We’ve just brought outside for a change of scenery, here she is lying next to me.
Bless her.
And also, my current view!
Here’s the link to Craig’s business FB page with a wee video of her getting him and thanking everyone!
Soooo, my strange comment at the weekend can now be explained.
We’re sitting in Woodbury Salterton in Devon, on Friday 24th, having lunch with friends, we’ve been there for an hour, when we get a call to say that Khaleesi has hurt her leg.
Khaleesi is the Belgian Malinois recue that came all the way from Spain.
Craig had gone out to train Jo-Rosie Haffendon’s dogs, for a week in April last year and fallen in love with her. When Jo’s circumstances changed, Khaleesi needed a new home and within an hour of Craig seeing Jo’s post, Khaleesi was going to be ours.
We joined our gang in September 2023.
Both of her right legs are badly injured. The front leg has virtually no power and she often holds it up when she walks, the back leg has fused at the wrong angle.
You can kinda see the right back leg in this picture, splays out to the right.
So we spend all of Friday afternoon in phone calls back home, trying to decide what’s best.
She isn’t moving…. She won’t move off the bed for food. It’s heartbreaking for those who are with her and equally awful for us being so far away.
We decide that she needs to be seen by a vet and my lovely in laws and sis in law manage to get her to their vet by 6pm on the Friday night.
She’s doped up to the hilt and has a bandage on her back leg.
They believe she has ruptured her tendon in the back leg.
By this time, Craig has already decided that he has to come home. He made me stay, but the logic was, if he went through the hassle, and cost, of coming home, then by some strange twist of fate, we might not lose her.
A dog that can’t put pressure on both legs on the same side is not going to live a great life.
Given that we were an hour and half drive from Bristol, and everyone we knew down there was heading to a wedding on the Saturday, made the travel more difficult.
My lovely friend Helen booked him a bus from Exeter to Bristol Airport, her partner Mike picked him up on Saturday at 7.30am and off he went…
EasyJet charged us a fortune despite the sad story but hey, it was the right thing to do.
We can’t thank our in-laws and Craig’s sister enough, for everything that they did.
Once he was home and he got to see the true extent of her injuries and he started to worry we may lose her.
She could barely move but she was very happy to have him home and fussing over her.
He investigated her leg under the bandage and realised what the tendon rupture meant, the bottom part of her leg just moves all over the place.
The front leg had been the worst and now this one was worserer… I know that’s not a word 🤦🏻♀️😂 I’m trying to inject some humour into a stressful situation, it’s what I do…
He slept with her on Saturday night and I travelled home on my own, on the Sunday. I cried when I saw her. She wagged her tail at me but didn’t move.
We cuddled up in the couch in the evening.
I came downstairs on Monday morning and had this awful feeling she wouldn’t have made it through the night.
Of course she had but she was the same the whole of Monday, so lost and sad looking but then, so was Craig.
It was not my story to share as we needed to know what was going to happen before he told Jo-Rosie, her previous owner, and before he told anyone on his business page.
I’ve never seen him so upset.
He slept in the living room with her again last night.
This morning they had another vet appointment at 8.50am.
It was a lovely morning and I spotted them out in the garden so I did a wee impromptu photoshoot, just before work.
The mood was very somber, we were both scared that she might not come home with him. I was sure she would but Craig was convinced this was it.
So the very good news is that Ed the Vet has sent her X-rays to a vet hospital, Broadleys in Stirling and they believe they can fix her injured back leg.
“She will require surgical treatment via tarsal arthrodesis. either partial arthrodesis or pantarsal depending on the level or extent of the injuries”
In layman’s terms there is a chance that they can fix the leg, better than it was when she came to us.
Craig text me straight away to say “she’s coming home, they have options”, what an immense relief.
It’s been a dreadful few days and finally there is some light at the end of the tunnel.
Khaleesi knows something has changed. She is reflecting Craig’s mood, she is brighter and even came to the door to meet me when I came in tonight!!
We’ve had some cuddles on the couch!
So the bad news in all of this is the cost.
She is not covered by insurance as this is a pre-existing condition.
We need to generate somewhere in the region of £6,000…… but we can’t not try.
Craig has started a Go Fund Me page to try to help us raise the money. It’s hard to ask people for help but we can’t lose her when the vet had so much hope.
Here she is stretched out in all her glory… bless her.
She has a green bandage now!
We have been truly humbled by the extent of the donations we have received in the short space of time since he launched it. So many donations from wonderful people who are family and friends and more people that we don’t even know… they maybe know Khaleesi from her previous life.
The Rambling Sloth 🦥 