After reviewing www.tripawds.com, it became apparent that there was any number of things that needed to be done to prepare for Hudson’s return home in his altered state.
First, we bought a sling. (We actually bought this after his “ACL” was diagnosed, we would have needed it after ACL surgery anyway.) We forced both Hudson and Porter to be practiced on, which as you can imagine, did not go over well. (This picture is of Dr. Winton, the medical director of Big Dogs Huge Paws Inc, and one of our foster dogs, Lola. Lola has since been adopted and lives in Leadville.)
Next, we bought a harness. Everyone at Tripawds said that the harness had helped them a lot when their dog first came home. We are a little unsure how a front harness is going to help us with a rear leg amputee, but everyone swears by it. Besides, most of Hudson’s weight is in his barrel chest anyway. The Ruff Wear Web Master harness is modeled here by Porter.
The next item to tackle was our flooring. The majority of our house is carpet, a fact I have bemoaned for years. Only our main floor is wood. It turns out that this is actually fortunate, as a three legged dog is much more prone to slipping on wood, tile or laminate. During Hudson’s recovery, we are going to keep him on the main level so he can avoid climbing stairs unnecessarily. To prevent him from slipping, we bought a couple of packs of foam flooring from Sam’s Club. They snap together to stay in place, and we added a rug pad to make sure the foam wouldn’t slide. It took us approximately 10 minutes to put this together. Our lovely model Lexi provides frame of reference for how large the area is. This isn’t quite a full two packs. We put the extras on the tile floors in the bathrooms. The rest of the main level has rugs already interspersed throughout, so we focused the tiles only where there were large stretches of uncovered wood floor.
No comments:
Post a Comment