Last Friday I was lamenting life without Murphy. He ended up getting the go ahead to come home that day. (Thankfully.) But coming home meant making some changes to our lifestyle.
Caring for Murphy the Cone Head
The surgeon sent us home with some strict instructions for caring for Murphy for the next eight weeks.
1. Because he has stitches, he has to keep his cone (a.k.a. Elizabethan collar) on at all times. (I’m sure he has stitches at the surgery site, but a cast’s covering those up. The stitches the vet’s trying to keep him away from are on his shoulder. They had to take some bone from there to graft on to his paw during the surgery.)
2. Much to Murph’s chagrin, he’s restricted to super limited activity. This means no bunny hunting expeditions, no chasing bumbles, no playing of any kind. He gets to go out to poop and pee. That’s it. Then back inside to lay down. And it’s leash walks only. No free roaming for him.
3. We must keep him confined to a small area or crate.
4. When we do go out, we have to cover his cast with a plastic bag. (The vet gave us a nice thick one that used to hold 1000 mg of some kind of medicine. Very ingenious way to recycle vet supplies I thought!)
5. To keep him from gaining weight during the next eight weeks, we have to feed him less and add a half teaspoon of Metamucil to his food.
6. We also have to keep Murph comfortable. Which means clean and soft bedding so he doesn’t get bed sores. I bought him a new bed to try and help with this. He has a dog bed already, but he doesn’t use it. (Mr. Meow does!) The new one has bolsters on three sides which is more like the chair he normally likes to lay on. So far he’s using it a lot more than his other bed. (Heck, even if he just laid on the new one once he’d have used it more. I don’t think he even sniffed the other bed.) But he seems to like this new one.