The bloody leg

March 2022. I finally decide to schedule the surgery for my dog. He has a mass on his left back leg, a growth, benign, as far as we know, but still a growth, and over the past two years it has grown noticeably. He also started licking it obsessively, causing discharge and infection. It was only a matter of when, not if. The surgery date is Friday, April 22nd. The vet recommends seven days rest afterwards.

I had put off the surgery for a while, for reasons. First, I didn’t know the dog very well, and a dog who does not trust me should not go through this ordeal. Second, I’m not a fan of operations on dogs, unless there is a clear medical reason. And for most of the first two years, the thing didn’t bother him at all. It was just there.

Day 0. In the morning I sit with him in the clinic, lights dimmed, and I sing to him, until his lights go out as well. Then a few hours without dog. The surgery went well, but the growth turned out bigger than expected, and the wound is bigger, too. Bunny is very wobbly and tired and can barely walk. I lift him into the car, but beyond that he screams when I try to carry him. He doesn’t know how to walk on three legs yet, he can’t climb the stairs, and I can’t leave him alone. The only solution is to sleep with him in the garden. It’s only logical. It is a clear, still, beautiful night.

Day 1. In the afternoon, Bunny manages to climb inside the house. He can walk okay, and we spend some time with him in front of the house. We still allow him on furniture, and and we let him move around in the house. That is probably a mistake. First traces of blood are visible on the large plaster that is covering the wound.

Day 2. The two expected problems, keeping him still in the house, and stopping him from licking his wound, have not materialised. Instead a new one: He can’t ‘go’ without walking for a while, which we can’t do. Without that he just goes crazy, also not ideal. There is no good solution. He has to walk, until he goes. More blood on the bandage.

Day 3. Today we are supposed to take the bandage off. It is not difficult, because by now it has almost fallen off by itself. While being outside, Bunny jumps after another dog, like he does. Blood starts squirting out of the wound. We rush to the vets. Bunny gets sedated and emerges with a thick purple bandage covering the entire leg. At home he refuses to leave the car, and whines whenever we stop petting him — a common side-effect of sedation. I end up sleeping with him in the car until he eventually overcomes his anxiety, around three in the morning.

Day 4 and 5. The first period of fake recovery. We adopt. The dog adjusts. We walk, or limp, five minutes in the morning and five in the afternoon. We use Trazodone to keep the dog calm during the rest of the time. It all looks good, but we don’t know what’s happening under the bandage. While we are trying to take it off, Bunny goes at us, hard, then proceeds to eat bits of the bandage. Not cool.

Day 6. Another vet visit. Another sedation. A new bandage, now babyblue with little sheep on it. The wound is now freshly stapled to help with the healing. This time, and with the help of Trazodone, we skip the hours of anxiety after sedation. I decide that this is probably going to take four weeks, and adjust accordingly. I cancel the trip to the hills we had planned for day 14.

At some point during this week I made my peace. I forget about the guilt, the remorse, the thought ‘this is all my fault’ and ‘I should not have done that’. I remind myself that this was necessary, if not now, then later. I see the whole process as a last, residual debt we have to pay for mistakes that have been made in Bunny’s first two years. Just like the lack of socialisation, the lack of training, this is just another sign of neglect: Not taking care of a growth in its early stages. And that’s why we have to suffer now. It’s the last obstacle.

Day 8. The third bandage is yellow and with pictures of little chicken. Sedating him is getting harder and harder. We don’t go into the clinic anymore, because it’s too stressful. The vet sees us at the carpark. Still, Bunny knows that someone is going to stick a needle into his neck, and he is doing everything he can to stop them. Also, the wound on his leg is not healing. Bunny is stumbling home, falling asleep while standing, too groggy to lie down. We play a lot of board games. The vet bills have topped a thousand pounds.

Day 9 and 10. The second period of fake recovery. The aggression is becoming a major problem. We can’t even put a plastic bag over the bandage, to protect it from the wet grass, without getting attacked. He is not biting, at least not immediately, but he punches with his open mouth. This hurts even when he is wearing a muzzle. He comes at me several times, with little or no warning. Not funny. I buy a bottle of Buckfizz to celebrate the day when the bandage is coming off.

I start wondering if I will ever get my dog back. The old Bunny. He seems gone, far into the distant past, and instead I have a hobbled, inactive dog that only wakes up to bite me. It is difficult to see the end of it, the process, the path. It has been so long, almost another time. Since the first surgery spring has arrived properly. It is bright until 10pm. The grass is growing like crazy. The birds outside have started making loud noises. I sneak outside one calm sunny morning to count birds on the coastal path, bliss.

Day 11. Okay, the bandage is off. But the wound is still open, despite everything, nothing to celebrate. The skin around the wound is rubbed raw by the bandages. It’s a difficult discussion. We decide to give it a few days, and tentatively schedule another surgery for day 17. I’m close to crying on the vet carpark, where we spend so much time now. Bunny is wearing an inflatable collar, but that doesn’t stop him from getting to the wound. We order another one, slightly bigger. Bunny seems increasingly depressed. Moments of joy are treasured.

Day 12 to 14. The third period of fake recovery. We cover the living room with towels and bedsheets. It looks like a mad art installation. We take him in the car to go for little walks, in Kilminning, to the village park. It’s just an attempt to relieve boredom, for him and for us. The two inflatable collars are not working, so we go back to the classical Elizabethean collar, the ‘cone of shame’. Because he can’t turn around in the bedroom with the cone on, we all decide to sleep and eat and breathe in the living room. If I want to cuddle with my dog, I need to go into the cone as well.

With the protective collar, the dog can’t scratch or lick himself. His entire hygiene routine is gone. He can’t clean his paws, or his genitals, or scratch his ear, or bite his toenails. The discomfort must be very difficult to bear. We learn how to replace his routine, by scratching in places he can’t get to. He tells us what he needs. He even licks my hand after I have scratched his ear, just like he does with his own leg. It becomes just another exercise of interspecies communication. I refrain from licking him though.

Day 15 and 16. The wound starts producing discharge. We spend a lot of time trying to decide if the discharge is clear (good) or green (bad). The dog spends a lot of time guarding the spots where something was coming out of his leg. Because that includes our mattress, we have to go back to the bedroom overnight. The next morning we don’t know which spots in the living room are dangerous. The place is mined. The dog is growling at me the whole time.

I start having nightmares about blood and wounds and pain. At night, when he is lying awake, when I’m lying awake, I peer at the wound with a torch, and in the poor light it always looks terrible. Is this really my dog? What have I done to him? How much blood is he going to lose tonight? I sink back into the mattress on the floor and start dreaming. I wonder what kind of nightmares he is having.

Day 17 is day 0 again. Sedating him is not as peaceful as the first time, at this point it involves four people wrestling with an angry dog. Under full anaesthesia, the wound is thoroughly cleaned, examined, and closed again. This time the vet takes lots of pictures, peering into my dog’s leg. I make a Google album with all the photos of the wound. It’s called ‘The Bloody Leg’. We spend a quiet morning at home, alone, before we get the dog back. It is another depressing day. I feel trapped in a recurring nightmarish groundhog day without a way of escaping, just misery, blood, and boredom. The vet bills have reached two thousand pounds.

It is not clear to me how this is ever going to end. Why should this surgery be any better than the previous one? Why should it hold up this time? And how are we going to keep him still for a week or more? There is not much we can do. I try not to think about it. Doubts are suspended. Life is on hold. We go back to the living room.

Day 18–20. First period of real recovery. We try to practise a very low energy life right in our living room. Apart from the old problem of getting him to go to the toilet, we don’t move, at all. For the foreseeable future, I will spend at least 23 hours a day in the living room. We take lots of pictures of the wound and WhatsApp them to the vet. We go outside twice a day, very briefly. Every time it is a nerve-wrecking experience. Every time I fully expect streams of blood. But nothing bad happens.

Day 21. Exactly three weeks after the first surgery. For the first time, the wound looks completely dry. The dog is ill the whole day, with stomach cramps. In the evening, he starts vomiting. Most of the food he ate that day gets scattered throughout the house, in various stages of decay. He is in pain, restless, unable to sleep. So are we. We stop some of the medication, and hope for the best. He gets better quickly.

It is not easy to do cruel things to your dog. Three weeks ago, I had second thoughts whenever I had to so something that was uncomfortable for him. Whenever I had to take something away that was fun. Now I’ve learned my lesson. I obsess about keeping him in a room, keeping him supervised, keeping him still. I try to control every step, and every movement he makes. It seems like the only nice thing I can do for him.

Days 22–23. Second period of real recovery. We practise a lot of toy identification with the dog — he has to point with his nose to the right toy when I give him a cue. Rabbit! Newt! Duck! He is doing very well, probably out of desperation.

I had started to train him on object identification months ago, but with very limited progress. It is clear that he can distinguish the three toys, but he is also very distracted and proactive and obsessed with the reward. Now he is looking at me, waiting patiently, and then gives the correct answer. Within an hour I add a fourth toy, a leguan. Easy. Apparently, a depressed, bored dog is better at doing puzzles.

Day 24–28. We celebrate a full week without vet visits, and the first days without meds. The walks get slightly longer. We also start taking the cone off during the day. Watching the wound heal is extremely slow television, but at least there is a clear trajectory now, and it leads back to a normal life.

Day 29–30. We spend the weekend in a cabin and go for our first real walk since the first surgery — through woodland, with flowers, other dogs, and ice cream. It is the best dog day.

Day 33. We visit the nearby secure dog field, for the first time. Bunny is off leash for an hour, running after balls, climbing obstacles. Everything looks great. His gait is a bit awkward when he is going fast, using both back legs simultaneously. The next days I try to gradually run with him a bit more.

As much as it hurts to take fun things away from the dog, it is really good to give them back to him, bit by bit. He looks so happy when I finally tell him that we can go to the park. When we don’t have to stop after half a mile. When he can go with me into the kitchen. Climb on his bench to look out of the window. Little things. The dog’s world is made of little things. Lots of them.

Day 34. Kathrin leaves. I take the cone off, forever, I promise. Finally we go back to sleeping in the bedroom. I hope that I’m going to wake up when Bunny starts licking or biting his wound. But he is pleasantly disinterested in the scar, which keeps looking better and better. I can even clip some of the threads that are sticking out.

Day 36. I fall asleep in the bedroom, while Bunny is in the living room. He wakes me up, panting, asking for attention. Something is off. I realise that he is concerned about the wound. He has licked the scabs off, entirely, and the wound looks red and raw. I get the cone back and move back into the bedroom. I start him on Trazodone again. Groundhog day.

Day 42. Turns out it was only a minor setback. The raw bits heal within a couple of days. The hair is growing back. The skin looks healthy and normal. There is a kick-ass scar on his leg now, but it won’t be visible for much longer. He is still supervised strictly and I won’t leave him alone with the wound for another week or two. He is back to normal exercise. We walk more than 30 km a week, about half of pre-surgery distances. And he is the exact same Bunny he was before, with all his features and flaws.

Once you have decided that your dog is an actual living being with a complex inner life, with complicated emotional reactions, with capacity for happiness and sadness, with a soul, as some would say, there is no way back. You can’t turn around and then pretend that this doesn’t matter, that the dog is just a creature of instincts and habits and nothing else, a furry Pavlovian machine. It matters. And because it matters, you cannot help but feel with him when he is in pain or distress. It is the continuous 24/7 empathy, the worry and care, that made this process so exhausting for the humans.

And there is something else. It’s so bad that you can’t explain this to him, people keep saying to me. And I disagree. I don’t think that’s a problem at all. Dogs don’t need explanations, humans do. When things go bad, dogs need to be able to rely on their humans, they need to know that this is going to be all right. And this has been our mantra from the day I got him, two years ago: It’s going to be all right. He knows.

(Almost all pictures by Kathrin Passig.)