Some photos of Sydney from the last month or so. Enjoy!
Sydney and Shiloh playing at my parents' house. Shi kept running away with the toy, but when she realized Syd couldn't move as fast, she brought it back. Sydney can move pretty quickly when she wants to, however, so she gave Shi a run for her money.
This was a serious play session! Sydney was having a blast.
A little break in the action. Syd is chewing the (de-) stuffed cow toy, savoring her small victory.
De-squeaking and de-stuffing a new toy. Doggie heaven!
Very intent on her prey.
Please note the stuffing hanging out of her mouth.
Sydney standing at her food and water bowls. Not a great picture of her standing - she was actually starting to sit down. But you get the idea. Standing! So exciting!
A cuddle break during play time. :)
Trying out her new life jacket. There isn't much time left in the summer, but there still are swimming adventures to be had!
"Ok Mom, can I take it off now please?"
Playing with a big stuffed hedgehog toy she picked off the shelf at Petsaver (Thanks Amy!). She LOVED this toy! Look at all that stuffing and that smile!
Hard at work. Please note the hedgehog's severed nose in the foreground. The nose was the first casualty. Sydney went directly for the nose, methodically sawed at it with her teeth, yanked it off, and then went to town de-stuffing the hedgehog.
Alas, too much time has passed yet again since my last blog update. Let's get right to it.
Sydney has been making some great progress. I see her everyday, so it seems gradual to me, but when I stop and think about the fact that we have only had her for one month and a few days, I am impressed at how much she has changed. When she came to us her hind legs and entire rear end were seriously atrophied; her legs and hips were tiny! As the weeks have gone by, her legs and hips have filled out with muscle - this makes her heavier when I walk around with her holding her hip harness, but that's ok! I'll take it! - and you can feel the muscle when you touch her. I mentioned this in my last post, but the muscle growth has continued and is still very much worth a mention.
Sydney and I now take small "walks" without her wheelchair/cart. I hold her back end up in her hip harness and we walk down the street with Syd moving her back legs in a walking motion and making contact with the bottom of her feet on the ground. It was so exciting to start doing this! When she first came to us she really didn't move her hind legs at all when we took her out to go to the bathroom with the hip harness. Now it is like she is walking, just not with all her weight on her back legs yet. Her back legs get tangled when she is trying to "walk" this way, and sometimes she does bunny-hops and is just generally uncoordinated, but she also has stretches of good walking movements - no tangles and no bunny hops! She has also started to put more weight on her legs when doing these walking movements. I support her but I play around very gently with how much I hold her up, and if she is having one of her good walking moments, I try giving slightly less support to give her the idea and reintroduce her hind legs to walking with some weight. It seems to be working! I also make her stand as much as possible when we are outside. Sometimes she doesn't feel like walking, so I help place her feet in a good position if she hasn't found it already herself, and let her hold herself up. She is getting better and better at this, and can do it for much longer periods of time now. She is much more balanced too. She now stands completely on her own (I place her in the standing position - still working on going from sitting to standing herself) while eating meals. It seems like a great exercise in balance, to stand when she is eating, since her head is down a bit (I have the bowls up on a little shelf so they aren't all the way down to the ground) and she is moving her head around and focusing on the food. She does it quite well now. And yesterday, while outside for one of our short "walks," Sydney was standing on her own - she wanted to hang out and sniff the air instead of walk for a moment - and she actually took two steps with her back legs, very slowly, without any support at all! It is very exciting when something new like this happens.
The techs at TheraVet have also noticed how well she is doing. They used to squeeze her tail to stimulate the nerves in her back end when she walked on the underwater treadmill, but they don't have to anymore! They can tell how much stronger she is, and they comment on how happy she seems :). She does seem happy. She plays with toys, gets VERY excited to play with our dog Shiloh, and is always so happy to meet new people or say hello to those she already knows. In fact, people we meet when out for walks often comment on how happy she is. Again, it's that lesson Sydney gives us - to enjoy life, to be happy with and grateful for the blessings we have in our lives. Not being able to walk certainly has not depressed her, at least not while she has been staying with us.
Potty accidents still happen, but it is not as hard as it was in the beginning. We use a diaper at night (I wrote that last time, right?), and it has made a big difference for us. She often doesn't use it during the night, but it is a great backup plan for us, so that we can still get a full night's sleep (except if she poops - the diaper doesn't get that - and assuming she wakes us up when she goes). We have had a few more accidents with urination. Those are definitely the worst. But - cross your fingers - it hasn't been bad. I am taking her to the vet tomorrow for a bit of a check-up, and one of the things they are going to check out is whether she might have a slight UTI or something that might be affecting her ability to hold her bladder. It may just be the temporary paralysis and nerve regeneration/muscle strengthening, but it could also be something more. Either way, it will be good to get everything checked out and make sure there is nothing else going on. The poor girl doesn't need any other health issues! Learning to walk again and make it outside to go to the bathroom is quite enough!
I said in a much earlier post that I planned to take videos of her therapy. I finally did it today! I had never used the video option on my camera, but somehow I managed to figure it out. Now that I know how, I will try to catch Sydney and Shiloh on video when they are playing. It's so cute!
So, at her therapy session today, I got some video clips of Syd at various points. The first video is of the techs loading her into the tank with her life jacket, filling it up, and starting the treadmill. When she is getting into the tank you can see a black thing wrapped around her rear end. That's a washable diaper they put on her in order to keep the tank water clean if she has an accident. You'll see the water level rise slowly, and toward the end of the water rising, Sydney starts hopping in the water with her front legs. I wish I had recorded her last therapy session - she hopped so much! It's very entertaining to watch. When she starts walking, the tech that is in the tank with her is helping to keep Sydney's legs from getting tangled, but otherwise Sydney is doing it all on her own.
The next clip is a 1 min 30 second recording in the middle of Sydney's walk on the underwater treadmill. In the beginning her back legs were a bit erratic, but by the middle of the walk, she was walking a bit better. She walked for a total of 15 minutes.
See her back legs kicking when she is swimming? :) You can also see the tech holding the end of Sydney's tail while she is swimming. As I have mentioned before, this helps her legs move - something to do with stimulating the nerves. They don't need to squeeze her tail while walking underwater, but looks like it was still useful for swimming. In the middle she got her legs tangled for a bit.
So, all in all, things are going very well! We are so impressed by the progress Sydney has made so far, and are excited to see her continue to get stronger. It is such a relief to see all this progress after the fear we had early on that she may not recover much more than she already had. With all this progress, I really think she is going to walk again, and hopefully in the near future.
