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Neville's fixed knees
Friday, December 22 2017
Essential household activities have a way of happening at the same time as essential workplace meetings. This morning Gretchen arrived home with post-surgery Neville just as one such meeting was beginning. I had to briefly leave that meeting and quickly construct a corral in the living room in front of the woodstove. Most of the materials (segments of kiddie barricade and overturned chairs) had been pre-positioned already, but I still had things I needed to do. Gretchen had decided not to have the corral in the first floor office (where we usually have it for such post-surgery recovery) because it's just so much more comfortable in the living room near the woodstove. But to make a proper-sized corral, we would need barricades on all four sides; all the walls were too far away to use.
Interestingly, Neville had no casts or bandages over his surgical incisions (there were two near each knee, each about four to six inches running parallel to the length of the leg). They were stitched, of course, and Neville had to wear a cone around his neck to keep from licking and chewing at the incisions. Amazingly, he was already walking normally on his repaired legs, though the surgery was still fragile and his world would need to be limited to the corral (with occasionally leashed forays to the yard to attend to bodily functions). Gretchen reported that Neville had been whining and complaining during the whole ride home. He continued to do so today, particularly when nobody was visiting him in the corral. But he also slept a lot (and was quiet then). He's on a lot of painkillers, including regular doses of tramadol and a fentanyl patch on his skin at the base of his tail. The surgery required the splitting and wedging apart of his two tibias, so it's no surprise he's uncomfortable (even with all the pain killers).
This evening when Gretchen got back from a special holiday shift at the bookstore, I moved the mattress from the basement Gunther Room up to the corral to make a larger surface for Neville and any human, canine, and feline guests. With the fire blazing, his corral was a cozy place that other critters gravitated towards, even those who had no requirement to be there. Gretchen spent much of the evening with him reading. To help with that, I set up a reading light that could easily be switched on and off from there in the corral. I also added bungee cords to make parts of the makeshift barricade more secure (though Ramona and the cats could still jump over these to come and go as they pleased, even with the "gate" closed). Tonight Gretchen and Ramona slept with Neville in the corral. There wasn't quite enough room for me, so I slept upstairs in the otherwise-empty king-sized bed.
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