violet had her surgery and yesterday she had her 3-week follow-up where we found out that while she’s healing well she will definitely not have a fully functional leg, although it could prove helpful for balance and some other leg-centric activities. the biggest issue is that violet seems to have written the leg off completely – won’t use it, won’t look at it, won’t have nothing to do with it, to the point that she many times lets it drag behind her and the sores and ground-down nails that result are of no consequence to her.
up until yesterday i’ve been mostly concerned and worried about her just getting to live her life. now that she’s been given the go ahead to return to basically full activities (which are fuller here than she probably is used to) i’m excited to see her start to thrive. in a nutshell we’re going to do the things we can to try to get her to use the leg and if it becomes dead weight for her or is a continual problem trying to keep her foot safe then we’ll have it amputated. since we’ve had two 3-legged dogs and countless 4-legged dogs we’re fine with either scenario as long as violet gets to live the life she should have been living from the get go.
she’s such a sweetheart and so loving that i feel like a bit of a jerk for being upset about her joining our family (before i knew her) but it’s not the first time i’ve felt that way and it probably won’t be the last.
i do have to interject into violet’s post to let you know that carly is the true star of our family. i’ll save the whole shebang for another post but let me just say that she has been a fantastic ambassador to the new introductees into our family, as evidenced in this video…