Sierra is home now after her right front amputation two days ago and looking very happy to be here.    She is settling in just fine and learning her way as well as could be expected.  She has some swelling which sounds like it is normal but one thing we are curious about is bruising.  She has a rather large bruise (red area) on her belly.  It extends well away from the incision area back towards her groin.  The bruised area and the incision seem to have fluid there when she stands.  It is not tight or seem to be sore to the touch so I assume this is somewhat normal.  I suspect some of the redness is a result from her laying on it but am curious of others experiences.

In typical Sierra fashion, she did everything to tell the veterinarian she was ready to go home.  After they decided to keep her the second night because she appeared to still be in pain (so they wanted to keep her on lower levels of iv pain meds), she managed to get around her cone and lick the glue off of the phetenol patch on her rear leg so they removed it.  They sent us home with tramadol in place of the patch and told us to keep her on that for a couple of days. 

Looks like Gus and Sierra could be littermates, so I think I have a pretty good idea of what your looking at, Gus had that same coloring in the same way and sure sounds like bruising. He was a left front amp, swelling was minimal I think but the bruising went away fairly quick. He didn't get along with Tramadol very well, we had to take him off after a couple days, he did have some phantom pain which started about 5 days post-op, lasted about 4 weeks, we used Gabapentin for that along with rimydal to control pain. Expect ups and downs but by the third week most show remarkable improvement. If you get a chance to catch some extra sleep, take it, it becomes precious at this time, but it's all worth it in the end. Paws up, Spirit Gus and Dan