Rocky's Rough Week

Let's face it, Rocky has anything but a tough life, this little pooch has everything he could possibly need and then some. He leads a pretty nice life, but he did have a rough week this week. It started out on Tuesday morning when I was putting some presents underneath the Christmas tree. Rocky had already tried to eat the tree, mind you it's a FAKE tree, it's not real, and could not possibly taste good, and he's also tried to eat the tinsel on the tree, again not something I imagine could taste good. But this one took the cake for worst Christmas item he could try to eat. He was sitting right next to me and the next thing I heard was a crunching/cracking sound. It was Rocky taking a bite out of a LIT christmas tree bulb, could you imagine? He just took a bite out of a Christmas tree light. I immediately panicked and shoved my entire hand in his mouth to take out every piece I could. I'm pretty sure I got 99% of the pieces out of his mouth, I "pieced" the pieces (does that even sound right?) back in my head and you could tell I had gotten the majority of the light, but I still of course worried that I missed a piece and he could have internal bleeding. I called the vet's office and they said to give him some white bread, and just monitor him. Thankfully we seemed to have gotten past that incident without anything happening.

We had to make a second call to the vet this week. We'd noticed for a long time that Rocky has a "skip" in his step sometimes, being the "google-er" that I am I did some internet research and deduced that he likely had what's called a luxating patella, which is particularly common in small dogs and especially poodles. This isn't usually  big deal and the dog can live with it, if it's not severe. However on Wednesday and Thursday this week we noticed he was limping a lot more and barely putting any pressure on the leg. Mike was so concerned on Friday that he called the vet and wanted to bring him in.

I couldn't go with Mike for the appointment since I was on a call, but when he called to say they were taking x-rays I rescheduled my call so I could down there and wait with him to find out what was wrong. Unfortunately the x-rays didn't tell us much, nor did the vet, other than that there is a problem with his hip (separate from the knee issue, which she did say he had what I thought). Rocky had discomfort in his left hip when she did the exam, so it wasn't the knee. We certainly weren't expecting an issue with his hip when Mike brought him in. She couldn't tell us if this was something he was born with, if it developed as he was growing, or if it occurred as a result of a physical activity, like playing around or jumping off something. All we know right now is that his bone seems a bit rigged and it's irregular. We're waiting for the other vets in the practice to look at the x-ray this week, although she didn't expect them to know much more than she did. And that they were going to refer us to a specialist, yes there are doggy specialists, we have to go see a radiologist and an orthopedic specialist and that there's a possibility he could require surgery. His limp seems a bit better today, although could be since we've been giving him an anti-inflammatory medication at night. So we're just waiting to find out more, I suspect though that this will not be cheap, but he's worth it.