The Accident Prone Puppy

I know I have only recently posted in November, and unfortunately, it's about Bailey again.

Last week, I came home and his abdomen was swollen, and hard to the touch, especially right around his hernia repair scar. I called the vet, and left a voicemail with them that I wanted to make an appointment. The next morning, his stomach was swollen a little worse, but I knew that he could make it until I took him to the vet. Or I guess I hoped he would. Whatever was "growing" on/in him must have popped and he was squirting blood everywhere.

So I got special permission from my boss, who is a dog person, to take extra time out of my work day to make an emergency run to the vet and drop him off. That was a pretty stressful 2 hours. They called me around 10 and let me know that, fortunately, it didn’t seem to be associated with his hernia repair but that it was right next to it.

Apparently, it was a doggie “sports hernia”, or pretty much just a really bad bruise. The vet thinks that Bailey either fell onto something, or a stick poked his stomach or maybe just stretched his ab muscles so tight that it tore. It must have happened sometime in the last 2 weeks, but as bruises on humans go, you can’t really tell, because it takes a few days for the bruise to appear.

So I don’t know how it happened, or when, but the blood finally pooled in his stomach, causing it to swell. That’s what I saw last week that concerned me. And the vet thinks that it popped simply because he’s such a big dog, and the pocket or tear (whatever it was) was completely filled with blood. So he had an internal “tear” that started the bleeding, and now he’s got a small hole on the outside that is what let the blood out.

The vet recommended at that time to start him on antibiotics and anti-inflammatories, to try and heal him medically, to avoid surgery. So I took him back in on Friday for a check-up 1 week later, and the vet said he didn’t like what he saw. The medicine definitely helped the swelling go down, but the wound wasn’t healing. There was dead tissue inside that was preventing (restricting) the veins from getting what he needed to heal the hole to where it needed to go. So they want to go in there, cut out the dead tissue, sew together healthy tissue to healthy tissue, and that should make it much easier to heal.

He’s not in any visible pain, and he’s still the rambunctious ball of “spaz” he’s always been. It’s just frustrating that he is hurt, again, and that now he has to have surgery. There is also a possibility that he has something stuck in there that is causing the dead tissue to form around it, like a piece of stick (if that’s how he got the bruise – by something poking him), in that case – I DEFINITELY want to get it out.


So that’s where we stand. 20 minutes later into typing this blog. :) Hopefully it didn’t take you that long to read it. I’m taking him in on Tuesday morning at 7 am, the procedure should take 20-30 minutes tops, and then I’ll be able to take him home that night. With a wonderful Elizabethan collar to boot. :)

Love you!