Poor Pretty Poodle Paw!
Strummer injured her paw yesterday. Her left paw and toes look like they are swollen to about twice the normal size of her right paw.
As we were leaving to walk to the Canine Cognition Lab yesterday, I noticed that she was holding up her left forepaw. After checking her paw and finding nothing, I walked the twenty-minute walk to Harvard campus with her, and I did not notice her limping. During the experiment, I noticed she was holding up her paw, and she limped the whole way home. I thought she'd feel better after getting some rest, but yesterday afternoon she seemed to be in even more pain, trying not to put any weight on her paw; I made an appointment for her at Porter Square Veterinary Clinic this morning.
This is the x-ray they took of Strummer's two forepaws this morning. Dr. Champaigne didn't see any indication of a break, but you can clearly see the swollen tissue of her left paw. He thinks she may have jammed her tow or sprained it, but he told me to monitor her paw for signs of infection. She's on Carprofen (Rimadyl) and we're putting cold compresses on her paw throughout the day.
The x-ray is interesting not only because Strummer has really beautiful bones, but also because it shows the plate in her right foreleg from when she had broken her leg before I adopted her. I knew she had some kind of hardware in her leg, and I've often curiously palpated the leg to see if I could feel it. I never thought I might someday get to see it!
Strummer was a show dog in her former life and lived for a year or two with a family whose daughter was a junior handler, before being returned to Lynn Travers, the breeder from whom I adopted her. Apparently during that period with the junior handler she had broken her leg. Lynn, who still grooms Strummer and occasionally boards her when Marshall, Kate and I travel and we cannot take her with us, had told me when I adopted Strummer that she had a plate in her leg and encouraged me to alert groomers to take special care when handling her left leg. Dr. Champaigne says, with the plate, the bone in her left leg is more solid than the bone in her right.