I haven't really had much to give in terms of updates on my Black Lab Nikki's recovery. The first couple of weeks were a bit rocky, but after that things calmed down and recovery was just slow (but generally uneventful.) She really handled being couped up much better than I imagined she would. She's just such a high energy dog, I thought she'd drive us crazy being confined to her kennel. I think the fact that I took her on 4-5 walks a day helped a lot. While most of the walks were relatively short (mostly just up and down our street,) it allowed her to get out and burn off some energy.
On Wednesday I took Nikki for her 10 week checkup (which was actually on week 11.) The surgeon who performed the double bilateral TTA is doing a paper on healing after the 6 week period, so I've been taking her in every couple of weeks to get new X-Rays done. Since this was part of a research paper he's working on, they haven't been charging for the visits or X-Rays.
After looking at the X-Rays, he gave us the "Ok" to let Nikki resume normal activities. She's allowed to do whatever she wants, but he wants us to limit her amount of activity for the first couple of weeks. He basically wants us to keep physical activities under 2 hours—which quite frankly shouldn't be an issue.
So, last night I finally got to play fetch with both our Labs in the backyard. She's running a little funky still—she short of hops her back legs. I expect as she's able to really stretch things out and regain complete range of motion of her back knees she'll return to full stride. The doctor warned us she'll probably show signs of limping for the first couple of weeks if she plays hard and not to be concerned unless it doesn't go away after a night's rest.
Well our pocket book is much lighter, we finally got our Nikki back. :)
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