"He can be off leash in the fenced yard," Hank's surgeon said on the phone last Friday, and I said "Great, thank you so much" in my calmest front-desk voice, then stood in the break room at work grinning at a vending machine for a solid minute.
Friday, May 15, was eighteen weeks and a day after Hank's TPLO. The recheck was a phone call instead of a visit. The week before, we'd sent the surgeon's office two short videos: one of Hank walking on the Sunrise Prairie Trail and one of him trotting beside Caleb along the backyard fence, on leash. The surgeon watched them, looked back over his March X-rays and called with the news. No more leash in the yard, a gradual return to normal play, and swimming once the water warms up.
Along with that came a short list of things that still aren't on the table. We wrote it on the whiteboard by the back door.
The first unclip
Saturday morning, Caleb and I both went out with our coffee. We walked Hank around the yard on leash for ten minutes to warm him up, and then I knelt down and unclipped him.
He didn't move. For about five seconds he stood on the grass looking at me, like he was waiting for the catch. Then he did one big lap around the raised garden beds, ears flat, tongue out, and I held my breath the entire way. Caleb said, "Well, there he goes," which for Caleb is a speech.
Hank came back, flopped down in the grass and rolled. The left leg looked just like the right one. I may have cried a little into my coffee. Mabel watched the whole thing from the dining room window with the air of someone who had seen it all before and wasn't impressed then either.
Easing into fetch
Fetch is Hank's favorite thing in the world, and also the kind of play that's hard on a knee: sprinting, braking, twisting, leaping. So we started small.
- Day one: five throws. A soft ball, rolled along the ground about twenty feet. No high lobs, nothing he'd jump for.
- Days two through four: eight throws, still low and short, always after a leash warm-up.
- By day six: ten throws, a little farther, and we're holding there for now.
Rolling the ball instead of throwing it high keeps his feet on the ground and his turns wide. He picks it up at a trot rather than skidding into it, which is exactly the point. He'd prefer the skid. He doesn't get a vote yet.
We stop while he still wants more. That's the hardest rule to keep, because he always wants more. Ending on throw ten while he's still bouncing feels mean. It's a lot less mean than another surgery.
The rules we kept
The whiteboard list, more or less the way the surgeon gave it to us:
- No ball-launcher marathons. The Chuckit! stays in the garage for now. It throws too far and too often for a leg that's still rebuilding muscle.
- No jumping in or out of the car. The ramp still comes on every trip.
- Low throws only, so no leaping catches.
- No fetch on wet morning grass. He tore the first ligament slipping on ice, and we are not testing his footing on dew.
- Watch him the next day for any limp, and if we see one, back off.
Caleb added one of his own: when a squirrel comes down the maple, we call Hank in before he gets going. Off leash, he will chase. The squirrel that started all this on December 28 is, as far as we can tell, still living in that tree, and Hank has not forgotten.
The bigger worry is the other knee. Back in January his surgeon told us that dogs who tear one cruciate ligament often run into trouble with the other one, so his right knee is the one we baby now. The advice for that was simple: keep him lean and keep his muscles strong. He's back to 67 pounds, down five from his crate-rest high in February, and he finally looks like himself again.
Every dog's recovery runs on its own clock, and the green light for yours belongs to the surgeon who knows that knee.
Tonight's count was ten throws. He brought an eleventh ball back anyway, dropped it on my foot and stared at me. We went inside.
