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Mousse comes
home... |
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We carried Mousse into the
house and laid him on the living room sofa. He had just spent 2
weeks in intensive care at the University of Florida vet
school.
All total, he had lost 35 pounds. He weighed
80 pounds when he had the first surgery with my local vet and he was only
45 pounds when he finally came home from Gainesville. In this photo,
you can see his hip bones and the bed sore that opened up on his right
hip. |
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Cleaning the open wounds was
a daily routine. My instructions were to keep the bed sores clean
and dry until the team at the vet school could surgically close the wounds
after a week at home to gain some strength back.
The feeding tube had been left in place for that
week back home just in case he had a set-back. Thankfully, we never
needed to use it.
Because he had gone so long without eating, we were
to feed him a couple of spoons of food every 2 hours. He couldn't
keep down more than that at any one feeding.
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This is a closer look at the
open sore on his right hip. In spite of the staff's diligent efforts
to keep turning him, these wounds opened up. Mousse had no body fat
left to cushion the skin. This wound shows the muscle and bone.
The wounds would weep body serum just as though he'd had a severe
burn. |
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Our solution as to how to
keep those open sores clean and dry was to create this doggy hospital
cover-up. We cut the sleeves off of a t-shirt and pulled them up
over each back leg. Each sleeve was pinned to the back of the
t-shirt to hold it in place.
I lined each sleeve with self-sticking sanitary
napkins. These wicked away the weeping body fluids from the wounds
while also providing a cushion for his boney body when he would lay down.
The dark spot that appears in this photo along the side of the shirt is
where the feeding tube was pulled through and pinned in place. This
was to keep it away from the floor when he lay down and to keep it as
clean as possible.
I held my breath as Dr. Beaver looked at these open
sores a week later, wondering if we had succeeded in providing good wound
care. Dr. Beaver was very pleased at how well the sores looked - if
one could think of them as "looking good." |
| The
recovery. |
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