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mysterious problem with Neville's right front paw
Saturday, August 12 2023
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
During the night, Ramona went out to bark at something near the cabin, which caused Neville to run out and do the same. He ended up being out there a long time. I heard him barking for awhile, but then I didn't hear him any more. He has an unusually quiet bark, so may have just gone a short distance into the woods and been muffled by the foliage. At some point, though, I got up and went outside and called for Neville to come back. I couldn't hear him or much of anything else when I did.
Later, though, I heard Neville whimpering just outside the cabin. He does that when he's excited to chase something (even when there is nothing to chase) and initially I thought that was what was going on. But eventually I went outside and found Neville lying near the car chargers (near the cabin's southwest corner). I told him we should go inside, and eventually he got to his feet. But then I saw he didn't want to put any weight on his right front paw. So I carried him into the cabin and placed him carefully on the bed I was sleeping in (in the larger of the two downstairs bedrooms). Something was very wrong with Neville's paw, though I couldn't see any surface injury and nothing looked swollen or out of joint. He clearly hadn't been directly attacked by a wild animal. But perhaps in his excitement he'd charged out over a cliff (there are line of them several hundred feet west of the cabin that are as much as fifteen feet high). It's even possible that the local coyotes (either by chasing or leading) use these cliffs to cripple their prey. That was as close to a working theory as I could come up with as to what had gone wrong. In any case, it wasn't an emergency. Neville seemed to be in a lot of pain when he applied pressure to his paw in a bad way, but most of the time he seemed comfortable. So I gave him an aspirin (concealed in a ball of peanut butter) and went back to sleep.
In the morning, I carried Neville outside so he could piss and then researched what veterinarian options existed in the greater Gloversville area. Most vets were closed on Saturdays, but eventually I found one that was open just east of Gloversville (near the southernmost shores of Great Sacandaga Lake) called Animal Medical Center. So I called them up to see if they had any openings today for a dog they'd never seen before. Eventually one of the staff got back to me to say I could come in at 1:30pm and see a vet then. This was great; there were so many things that could've gone wrong (such as them being a stickler for my having Neville's rabies vaccination records). This might sound kind of sad, but I was also a little proud of myself for having managed to make all these arrangements by myself. Normally Gretchen handles all these sorts of things, meaning I've done so little of that sort of thing for the last twenty years that I feel I've lost all the logistical skills I used to have (such as they were).
With an veterinarian appointment set up, I could do another load of laundry (I've been washing away the teen cooties from last weekend) and return to my foundation insulation project. While back listening again to the oldies station WFNY, I managed to dig nearly all the dirt out of the slot for the fourth sheet of styrofoam on the west foundation wall, opening up a void down to the footing (still about 83 inches below the top of the foundation wall).
At 1:00pm, I carried Neville out to the car and gingerly loaded him into the backseat, where he'd have the most room to figure out where to put his injured paw. I then had Ramona ride shotgun (their positions are usually the reverse of this). After fifteen minutes or driving, we were at the medical center. Interestingly, all the employees there wear uniforms that are entirely black. One of the techs was a tall guy with long hair who looked like he might be into Black Metal. He had me fill out the paperwork and got Neville's vital signs. Then I was left to wait for the actual vet. During that time, I went out to the car to get Ramona so could wait in the relative comfort of an air conditioned room.
The vet was a woman who had a warm (if somewhat gothy) Jersey aspect. She proceeded to manipulate Neville's right arm and paw, something he was surprisingly tolerant of. The only thing that seemed to make him wince with pain was the manipulation of his elbow joint. The vet said his joints and bones all seemed good, so her theory was that somehow a tick-borne joint problem had somehow manifested in the middle of the night. This seemed very unlikely to me given that his running around in the woods had caused the problem. But I'm not a vet, so I allowed myself to be led where this vet wanted to go based on the evidence she had. She wanted to test Neville for a blood-borne tick-carried disease. So I said sure, let's do the test. After many pokes with a tiny, she and her presumably Black-Metal-loving tech managed to get enough blood to do the test, though not without a lot of yelping and squealing.
The test came back positive, which really isn't surprising given how much tick exposure our dogs have had (especially given that many of these tick-borne illnesses are chronic and never leave once they make it into a dog). The vet then prescribed me a half-course of doxycycline to clear up the tick-borne infection as well as tramadol for pain and some sort of anti-inflammatory medication. After all was said and done, the bill came to about $350, which isn't bad considering the vet bills I've seen at the Hurley vet.
Back at the cabin, I resumed my foundation insulation project. I soon experienced a partial collapse of the wall of the trench I'd carefully dug out, but such setbacks rarely take long to fix, and soon I had my fourth sheet of styrofoam in place. At the end there I was hurrying to install it because rain was threatening, but that rain never came.
Later I went down to the dock with my good camera, having left it in a south-facing window to be baked by the sun all day (I was hoping this would drive out any residual moisture). To my surprise, though, now I found the camera wouldn't power on, and the problem wasn't the battery. Maybe that dunk in the water really had destroyed it. I sat on the dock feeling a little sad about this, but I couldn't sit there for long; the sky was quickly darkening as a massive thunderstorm approached. I ran back to the cabin and managed to get there several minutes before the deluge arrived.
In hopes of reviving my camera, I again suspended it in front of the dry air exhaust from the water heater in the basement and went to take a bath (so as to increase the amount of dehydrated air being blasted).
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