Update on Pepper
Just thought I should post an update on how Pepper is doing.
She’s doing much better now, but she’s not anywhere close to 100%. I recently took her in to get her leg x-rayed to make sure it wasn’t broken and it wasn’t. I did cut back on her food a little more than I already had to try and get her weight down to try and lesson the stress on both her good leg and bad leg. She’s lost a little weight, but not much. That could be due to not being able to be as active as she was before.
Beyond that, once the weather started to warm up, I started taking her on short walks of about a half mile. This seems to have had the biggest effect on her. She uses her bad leg more and doesn’t seem to have too much of a problem with steps anymore. I would take her on longer walks, but I don’t think that she is up to that just yet.
The vet has recommended surgery to repair her knee. When the time comes for that, I guess that there are 3 different types of surgery that I’ll have to decide between. Supposedly by having the surgery she will be able to get back to nearly 100%. This means she might actually be able to play ball again.
However, she can’t have the surgery yet. When she was in getting the x-ray, the vet noticed something in her blood work that could indicate something is wrong with her liver. I had to wait a month to take her in to get that rechecked to see if it would get better on it’s own. It didn’t. So now Pepper is on a new medication and we will see how that works for her. I have to wait another month to check that. The vet said that there is a possibility that it’s Cushing’s disease and the symptoms do seem to fit. There is a test to check for that, but I’m gonna wait to think about that until after we see how she does on the new medication.
So until then, no surgery for her leg. But Pepper seems to be doing ok and she is almost acting like her old self, though I can still see that she misses playing ball.
