To you and Millie, we send our most positive thoughts, best whishes and hope for a recovery filled with a return to the quality of life that you have known. In many respects, we feel lucky(?) in that we went from the slightest of limps that disapeared a quarter hour after rising in the moring, to full limp, carrying the left fore-leg and finally diagnosis followed by amputation in just weeks. This included less than a week from initial xray and diagonsis to amputation. For us, the chemotherapy was far worse than the amputation. The return to a quality of life has been excellent and we celebrated the completion of the eighth month ampuversary just last week. Millie's recovery may be difficult and have both ups and downs, but you will be able to have a very high quality of life return to her.

We all here can relate to the nervous state awaiting the outcome of the surgery. It is normal and just demonstrates how much Millie means to you. You should remain strong in front of Millie when she gets home to help keep her spirits up. I often suggest that we remember to treat the spirit as well as the body. Find something that Millie loves and exploit that love to get a reason for life back into her life. For Cherry, it was her love of going for rides. Often during the worst periods, she would only eat willingly during her daily rides in the car or truck. We still try to get out nearly daily for these rides and constantly looked for distinations that can help stimulate her curiosity. I also often suggest keeping a journal of the recovery process or journey. This helped me make real assessments to Cherry's progress during the recovery and I too posted the journal on the web for others to view. Thus like Jerry, I think that your video will help you tremendously and we look forward to viewing your progress. We need to convince Jerry to include a list of these journals, blogs, and video recovery histories so that new members can access them.

Again, we wish you the best and look forward to hearing how Millie is responding. I am sure that she will amaze you with her ability to adapt.

Bob & Cherry

Yeah be brave these first couple weeks after the amputation.  Ask your vet questions if you're worried, and share your worries here if you have to wait for answers, but know that it's not unusual for your patient to act unusual in the first couple weeks or so.  Yoda did a lot of vocalizing (whining) because of his pain meds.  He also confused me by being more active when he first came home and then after two or three days being very inactive, so I thought something had gone wrong.  In hindsight, it seems like all the drugs he was on kept him restless at first and then he was able to rest easier after those faded.  He also did a lot of staring at walls (though he was a big starer before) and turning in circles.  But this all eventually passed and Yoda has long been back to his old self - except that he's actually more social with people these days!

By the way, if you will be doing chemotherapy, I'll mention that Yoda has been getting carboplatin and is one of those very fortunate not to experience any side effects so far (knock wood!).  So while getting treated, he has adjusted to life on three legs and is enjoying all his old activities, though with more resting and water breaks in between.  The only things he hasn't mastered are going down the stairs (though he can, but doesn't like to) and catching rabbits (knock wood, again).  And not catching rabbits is fine by me! 

Good luck to Millie!

After Yoda's amputation, before taking him home, his surgeon told me that with the meds his incision site shouldn't be painful, didn't seem to him to be, but that Yoda had been vocalizing (crying) alot while he was at the vet's and that might continue.  If I was worried that he was in pain - that it wasn't just his reaction to the meds - he showed me a way to gently pat the incision area (which was well padded with bandaging) to make sure that it wasn't sore.  If he didn't react, which he didn't, then he wasn't in pain.  So, if you do start to worry, maybe check in with your vet and ask about something like that.  I know it's really hard to believe that they're not in pain when they do all that crying and panting, but Millie's behavior sounds completely normal for a dog post-amp and it's probably not pain-related.

The night before Emily got off her pain medication she was breathing so hard I thought she was about to have a heart attack or something.  I know that they handle the pain but expect side effects.  Thank goodness they are not on them long or we'd have a whole pack of 'three-legged stoner' dogs!