The May Day of all months

May was a particularly hard month for me this year.  I worked from home a lot, which would normally be a welcome treat, but I did it so much I started to feel stir crazy in my own home.  But that's not the really bad thing.

I took my dog Zoe to my parents house for Mother's day.  I brought her in to the house and then put her in the backyard while I went back to my car to get my Mother's Day present for my mom.  When I was coming back in to the house I heard a loud crash and a dog yelp.  Now, my parents have a dog named Coco but every parent knows the sounds their own child makes and I knew that sound came from Zoe.

Apparently she was running across their new tile floors and tried to change direction and slipped and crashed into a very heavy, very solid oak wood dinning room chair.  The chair come down on her tail and hurt her.  Except we didn't know that right away.  When I got in to see her, she didn't seem in pain or hurting.  She was running around the house wagging her tail like nothing happened.  That was until my mom came out of her bedroom and wanted to know if anyone was bleeding.

We course said no . . . but the blood splatters all over the walls told a different story.

I took Zoe outside and hosed her off as best I could because I could see a lot of blood on both her hips.  Once the water ran clear I checked her out and she seemed to be fine.  I left her outside and went back in to help clean up the mess.  There was blood everywhere.  She got blood through 2 hallways and 3 rooms.  Every time she wagged her tail it splashed across whatever surface was near by.  And not just at tail height.  There was blood splatter about shoulder height to humans.

It took about a hour of four people cleaning up the mess.  Then we sat down and had our Mother's Day dinner.  We decided that I should probably take Zoe to a vet to be checked out because that was a lot of blood, even though she didn't appear to be hurt. 

We let her back in and immediately she got blood on things again.  Outside she went.  She was once again covered in blood but we couldn't quite tell where it was coming from.  Her tail, obviously, but she had a lot of blood all over the rest of her.

After a crazy time trying to find an emergency vet open at 6pm on a Sunday night I finally get Zoe in to see someone.  The only place she got hurt was her tail but she had multiple lacerations on her tail.  They wrapped it up, pumped her full of pain medicine and antibiotics and outfitted her with a not so stylish Cone of Shame.  She was loopy and not happy about any of it.

After 4 vet visits over the next 8 days it was finally decided that we wouldn't be able to save her tail and that part of it would have to be amputated.  :(

One of the things I love the most about Zoe is that her tail is always wagging and you always know how happy she is by how fast she's wagging it.  Also, when I'm eating dinner and she knows not to jump up on me or get in my face she will sit very still except for the tip of her tail which twitches back and forth like it's saying "I can't hold all of my energy in so I'm going to let it out just through the tip of my tail".  Now that's gone.

She had surgery on the 18th and lost just more than half her tail.  She was feeling better but now she's pretending that the cone on her head doesn't exist and barrels in to everything like she doesn't care.  It's really annoying.  But I'm not going to complain because she's alive and feeling much better.  It could have been so much worse.

And it's kind of been worse.  Ever since the surgery she keeps ripping off the bandage that they've put on the nub of her tail.  She's not suppose to get to it with the cone on her head but she's figured out a way to use her knee to bend the cone a certain way so that she can just get to the tip of her tail.  She's ripped out 1 stitch and partially ripped out another one.  This has only resulted in more vet visits and vet telling me she's not healing up like she should because she keeps chewing on her tail. 

Because of this, they increased her nerve blocking pain meds which make her very sleepy.  They also gave me a sedative to give her if she starts going after her tail.  Basically I need to keep her in a semi-sedated state until our next appointment on June 7th.  It's been 4 days now and she's been sleeping almost the entire time.  When she is up and awake she walks around like a drunken sailor who would never pass a DUI checkpoint or an old woman who's joints are too sore to bend.  If you try to pet her you'll likely collapse her legs and make her fall down.  She's that out of it.  She's also taken to just stopping and staring blankly at whatever is in front of her.  Could be a wall.  Could be nothing.

As for me . . . well, I've been a nervous wreck ever since it happened.  I've been worried sick about her and it's been very hard for me to play video games or edit the videos I've already recorded because of how bad I feel.  On top of that, now I feel extra guilty because I have to keep her drugged up.  I feel like such a bad mommy. 

I haven't posted as many videos in May as I would have liked.  I actually had to resort to posting videos in a new game (Lego Harry Potter) because those were the easier videos to edit that I had already filmed.  I wasn't actually going to start that series until I finished Psychonauts.  Forget about trying to playing Psychonauts.  That game is really frustrating for me right now and I just don't have the energy to try, fail, die and try again.  Over and over again.  It takes a lot out of you and I don't have that much in the tank right now.

I am starting to find some mental energy to get back in to gaming.  I tired just playing things for fun.  It seems to have worked.  Overwatch helped with that.  We've still got a lot of healing left to do.  Hopefully everything will go well at our next vet appointment.  I can't wait for Zoe to get her cone off.  She's turned it in to a Weapon of Mass Destruction against me and my house.  I've changed my vacation plans in the middle of June because of her.  Whenever I think about how much of a hassle this has all been, I remind myself that things could have been much worse.  Let's hope that eventually things will get better.