My poor baby

So my Memorial Day weekend did not go as planned. Friday afternoon, after Bob got off work we went to buy a new lawnmower. Our old one died and our yard looked like something from deep in the heart of Arkansas. We managed to find a nice mower which, I'm told, is a "man's mower". We spent Friday evening breaking in the new mower. I've never seen my husband happier to do yard work!

Anyway, we finished up around 6:15 and I took the dogs in the house while Bob put his new toy away. As I'm getting a drink I notice a bunch of spots on the kitchen floor, which I soon realize is blood. I called Bob in and we started checking the dogs. It turns out Hunter's foot is bleeding a bit, but he wouldn't let us touch it. Bob called the vet and they said to bring him in.

I loaded Hunter in the car and we sped out to Banfield. The doctor took one look at his paw and said he needed stitches. The problem was that it was almost 7:00 and they couldn't fully anesthetize him because he would have to be monitored for several hours afterwards, something they weren't set up to do at night. She decided to partially sedate him, put a tournequit on his leg and inject a local nerve blocker so they could stitch him up. She sent me away and told me to come back at 8:00.

I ran a couple of errands, and when I came back they weren't done with Hunter. Finally, around 8:30, the nurse came out. Apparently my dog has the constitution of a water buffalo. They gave him three times the normal amount of sedative and he still managed to fight them. He needed to be fully sedated, which means I had to take him to the only 24 hour clinic in the area, about 20 minutes away. The doctor helped me get Hunter to the car because he was drunk from all the meds. It was pretty funny!

I picked up Bob and we drove Hunter to the clinic. He looked so pathetic laying on the floor of the examining room.

The clinic had to keep him overnight for observation after they stitched him up. They told us that because the cut was on the pad of his foot, they would put him in a splint to keep pressure off of it. I did not expect the splint to be so big though:

It's more like a cast all the way up past his elbow! Poor Hunter doesn't quite understand what's going on. We have to put rugs on the kitchen floor because he can't get any traction on the tile to hobble along! When we go outside we have to cover the cast, and of course it's monsoon season here in the St. Louis area. Ugh!

I'm using pain meds to keep him mellow. He is supposed to stay calm and not bounce around too much or he'll bust the stitches. I don't know if the vet realizes that he's a labrador and bouncing around is kind of his thing. We've made it this far, but we still have to keep him in the cast for a little over a week. Hopefully we can keep him calm. He is however, enjoying all the extra attention.