Still Hopeful

The "Limp Watch" continues day by day.  I scrutinize his leg constantly anymore, especially when he does something out of the ordinary.  A few days ago, we were on a walk (still not on a leash).  He lagged behind to smell something, so I gave a quick whistle to say let's go!  He came trotting back to where I was standing and I couldn't tell if he gave a short hop when he stopped or I'm just paranoid now.  After watching him intently for the last two days for any adverse sign, I decided I must just be paranoid. 

We did walk down to the school last night for the first time since he injured his leg.  No sign of limp or favoring afterwards, so he's looking good.  He was allowed to be a distraction for another dog at practice last Sunday too!  I think he enjoyed "killing" his tug for about 10 minutes while a newer dog was doing recalls in the next lane.  I never really grabbed it to tug with him, but he thought I might, so he kept killing it just in case I tried to get it from him.  Silly boy!

Hopeful

Zio was not a happy dog to be watching everyone else race this past weekend.  The positive news that came out of it is he did more walking over the last three days than I had allowed him to do in total for the last two weeks... and not a single sign of a limp!  A lot of this was on slippery tile floors that challenged his balance and going up and down stairs from our second floor hotel room.

I decided to have Dr. Duree give him a chiropractic exam while she was there.  She couldn't find any loosness in his knee at all.  She also suggested four more weeks of rest with some supplements to help his joints in general. 

It's going on two weeks now since I've seen any type of favoring on that leg.  I'm going to add a 10 minute walk in the morning to his 10 minute walk in the evening for the rest of this week.  If that goes well, we'll go for 20 minutes in the morning and 10 in the evening for a week.  I'll just keep progessing the walks slowly one week at a time until the beginning of June.  If he's still okay, we'll get back to practicing for flyball and see how it goes.