Dec
1
TPLO Week 3 — Same old, same old
No real change this week in our rehab plan. I’m going to increase our 10 minute walks by a couple of minutes later in the week, and see how Ticket does. She’s doing great on the treadmill–she did 14 minutes on Tuesday. She’s not having any limping, but is having the occasional weight-shifting in her xpen. We’ll have another underwater treadmill session on Friday.
We’re being pretty conservative. Our PT doesn’t want to do any land exercises (ie cavaletti, squats, etc), until we reach the 4 week mark. The first 4 weeks pose the biggest risk for hardware failure, as well as when most patellar tendonitis tends to develop. With the new angle of the stifle joint, there’s a lot of stress being put on that patellar tendon, and studies show that too much activity increases the risk of this. So I’m just fine being conservative and avoiding a setback like tendonitis which could seriously prevent Ticket from making it back in time for AKC Nationals. Next week will be 4 weeks, and we’ll be halfway there.
I’m doing one day of a local USDAA trial with Trip this weekend, and I’m going to take Ticket along to hang out. I may end up getting her final (post 3 year) USDAA measurement too–I’m pretty certain she can manage to stand still on a table, and even if her weight isn’t distributed exactly evenly, she’s not really that close to the 16″ cutoff, so it shouldn’t affect her measurement. And I’m looking at two shows as a target for her first trial back, assuming he recovery proceeds as planned. One of them is a small USDAA trial, which I think would be a good place to work on getting our groove back, but we’ll see. I’m going to be pretty picky about equipment and surface when she first comes back, since I have first hand experience with what a nut she will be. Rubber contacts and good dirt are going to be a necessity for a bit.
We shall see what next week brings…
