The NEW Adventures of Mika the Wonder Dog

Here’s hubby’s write up describing the past two days…

The adventures of Mika the Wonder Dog, who right now is still wondering “What the hell happened to my leg??”

We brought Mika in to the vet on Thursday morning for the amputation. They started the procedure about two hours later (neither of us were on-site for this) and it took about three hours total. The vet said that everything went great. Little bleeding, her muscle had atrophied a bit (from lack of use due to being a bum leg we presume), no open wounds, and that it took longer than she expected because “well, I knew she was a 100 pound dog, but that leg was BIG! It was really tough to get it off!”

We expected to bring Mika home on Thursday night, but she was so doped up that she could not have stood up even if she had four legs. So we talked it over with the vet and agreed that the best thing was to leave her in the crate, at the vet’s office overnight. This allowed us to leave her for a few more hours without forcing her to move and for the staff to check her out first thing. She was so stoned from the pain killers that she probably wasn’t lonely and she would have slept the whole night through.

When the staff saw Mika this morning, she was standing up in her crate. Apparently she squeaked a little bit when no one was around – she really liked the company, and the staff really like our sweet dog too. Tonight we picked her up about 5pm. Mari had made a special three legged dog carrying sling/strap out of an old towel that really helped us to hold her hind quarters up as she tried to negotiate the slippery linoleum floor with one front leg. Although whe was still drugged up quite a bit, when we left the office and helped her hobble on three legs toward the car, she was HAPPY – genuinely smiling and even wagging her tail it was probably because she was stoned, but still…. we picked her up into the car and drove home. Then I picked her up and lifted her down from the car onto our driveway. She took a couple of semi-supported steps and laid down for a break. We then got her up a couple of minutes later – supporti ng about ten pounds of her weight in the back (yes – it is counter intuitive that we would support her back, when the front leg was removed..) and she managed to walk-hop up the lawn, hop up the front door step and then hop again into the house. We laid down some rubber floor mats on the slippery wooden floor, so we guided her down the hall to her new bed (an old crib mattress that we’ve raised a few inches) where she fell asleep.

At 8:30pm, we took her outside (walk-hop with us holding about ten pounds again) where she hung out for a while, ate some ham treats and swallowed her medications. Going inside again was surprisingly less difficult (note that I did not say “easy”) than I expected and we got her back to her bed pretty quickly where she drank some water and fell back to sleep.

Without a front right leg (and her left hidden under a pillow), she looks a lot like a seal laying there, but she’ll be back on three feet in no time!