pet surgery

In case you don't read my sister's blog, she recently posted about her cat getting surgery to repair her ACL. My dog had the surgery on Friday, here is a picture of his tragic Frankenleg.If you don't know what the ACL is, it stands for anterior cruciate ligament and you usually hear about really active humans rupturing theirs. Well, as we have learned, dogs and cats can rupture theirs too and apparently it's quite common. So common in fact that our pet insurance does not cover the ($1300) surgery within the first year of having a policy. Lovely.
Recovery time for a dog is twelve weeks, during which I have to severely limit his activity, confine him while I am gone and take him outside on the leash to go to the bathroom - no unsupervised outside time. This makes it difficult to coordinate with my other two dogs and the dog door. Plus he has to wear an e-collar for two weeks so he won't chew on the sutures. If I take it off of him for just a couple of seconds he goes right for the incision so he has to have it on at all times.I knew all of this was going to be difficult but I was not prepared for the nighttime. He has been very restless at night and is not sleeping well at all. The first night he barked at me from about 1am until 6am because he wanted to get in the bed with me. I tried everything to calm him down, I even got down on the floor and tried to sleep with him but nothing seemed to help. The next day I decided I had to take drastic action to make through the next twelve weeks. So I put my mattress on the floor so he can sleep with me, spoiled rotten dog. Now that is great in theory except that he is still restless, off and on all night he was banging around with the e-collar; bumping into me, the wall, the alarm clock and anything else that was in his way. Of course now he is sleeping peacefully and I am exhausted. I have more sympathy for all you mothers out there!