This is Eva. At the time this photo was taken she was a happy two year old ready to take on the world (or even just the local metro park.) Within a few months, we would begin to notice a few subtle changes in Eva’s rear gait. Now, I should probably mention now that I call Eva by six trillion different names like E, mushy, mushball, princess, and basically any combination of all of that. Oh sometimes I even call her Eva! So anyways, at this point in time things were great. She is a well behaved baby who loves love, loves to explore, and was working on figuring out how to stay close enough to me on walks to where she was allowed off leash in big open areas! All of that came to a stop in the fall of 2014.

Like I said, initially we noticed small differences. I don’t even think we noticed them at first but once there was a bunch of little things, we started to figure it out. Eva likes to run in our small back yard and occasionally will turn some pretty tough tight corners, which means her back legs would occasionally slip out from under her and she would fish tail. It was never a problem. In 2014 we noticed when there was snow on the ground this tended to happen rather often so we had to keep her more relaxed in the yard. We noticed she came in one day and kinda slipped up the stairs leading into the kitchen, seemed like she rolled her toes a little, and started to stand kinda funny after that.
(sorry for the blur)

Around the time she started dragging her leg, I got nervous. I thought she sprained something or tugged on something wrong and I decided that it was time to watch it. I guess this seems to all work on a really clean timeline because I would say it was about January 1st when I said if she wasn’t walking better in a week we had to go to the vet. Eva has horrible vet anxiety so I try to hold off as much as possible because it can be a really stressful experience for both her and I to go to our family vet. I’m not sure why, but the waiting room freaks E out really bad and they ALWAYS make us wait in an exam room forever. I’m sure I’ll complain more about that later (as much as I love my actual family animal doctor, I hate their support staff.) It was January 10, 2015 when we finally got her in and got her leg x-rayed to see if there was a break or anything crazy going on.

Family vet said her xray came back well enough to where she couldn’t figure out the source of the lameness in the right leg (I feel like I forgot to even mention that aspect, it’s the right hind leg) so she referred me to go see an orthopedic surgeon at a facility about an hour north of my home to determine if Eva maybe had some cranial cruciate damage. She didn’t get a cranial drawer response but who knows. So we go to the orthopedic surgeon and (to sum up about three months of trials and tribulations) there was nothing noticeable wrong with Eva’s leg. Eva had no cranial drawer response and was still acting as normal as ever, just clearly uncomfortable with something. We explained to our orthopedic surgeon what happens with E’s legs when she runs and spins the corners, and the vet immediately felt up inside of her pelvic muscles and E screamed away. This was when she was diagnosed with an iliopsoas injury. We were happy with this diagnosis despite the fact that it could take up to three months to heal back to where she could use the leg comfortably. We were sent home with the infamous Rimadyl and tramadol as well as some alprazolam to keep my little wired princess less wired and more sleepy cuddly princess.

Over time I felt as though the medicine wasn’t helping, when she would lay down, she seemed to position the leg REALLY awkwardly and would never lay down for an extended period of time without adjusting herself or kicking around with that right leg. Some of the weird positions (in the chronological order I noticed them, too) are underneath here.

So clearly something uncomfortable was happening and changing.

The day we got back from the orthopedic surgeon, she told us to get another few weeks of Rimadyl as a soft tissue injury as deep as E’s could take a while to heal and Eva was actually doing fantastic on the Rimadyl. It reduced her pain a lot and we never had any negative side effects. I felt completely safe and comfortable using it. I went to my family vet and had them write me a month’s worth and I took it home.

On April 24th, Eva’s small bottle of Rimadyl was gone and I brought the larger mouthed bottle down from the cabinet and put it on the counter where all of her meds go. In a real twist of fate, when I left the house for ten minutes, my cat (had plastic still stuck in her teeth) chewed a nice chunk out of the top of the bottle as she tends to be a real pest about anything she doesn’t feel belongs in wherever place it occupies, and while she was doing that, she knocked the bottle to the ground. Lid was cracked so it fell off, and because we had always given the Rimadyl to E in the form of a treat (make her sit or stay or touch before giving it to her, they’re flavored, it always made her not realize it was medicine) she smelled it and went in for the kill.

Eva ingested 3000mg of Rimadyl on April 24th.

I don’t wanna get too far into that story because we thought it was so traumatic at the time that I could go on forever, but the fact is that Eva’s levels NEVER went out of a normal range (she was tested every 8 hours) she never got sick, etc. However she did have to spend four days getting her whole system flushed out. This means that when she came home she no longer was under the influence of the Rimadyl that she had been taking for somewhere around three months by this point, maybe closer to four.

We thought she was traumatized from the vet. She wouldn’t eat right, she was just happy to be around us but not much else. She was not the happy two year old we had once spent so much time playing with and yelling at for being rambunctious and biting the cat too hard or jumping too forcefully onto the tv table. When she had her one week check up post overdose, she had a pretty gross bladder infection and a couple calcium oxalate crystals in her urine (only two appeared in the sample but we put her on urinary S/O just incase) so we made another appointment to come back a couple weeks later when her antibiotics were completed. The vet appointment would also include more x-rays because even though E was using the leg the same amount as before the hospitalization, all of a sudden her muscle just started to die, her toes on her right foot began to not look right, and she appeared to have a very swollen knee.

All the while this was going on, she had always been toe touching. We have hardwood floors and we covered everything in rugs to make sure it was as easy as possible for her to remain mobile while in the home. I feel this is important to note. When she came home from the hospital, she no longer was using her leg. She would use it if it was a hot day and we went on a walk, but we had to walk at just the right pace to get some movement. Mind you, we were still thinking this was related to a soft tissue injury so we were advised to continue her short walks 2x a day. She is used to walking miles and miles so a block twice a day was torture to her. She would cry to stay out, and we spent A LOT of time laying around the backyard. Over the three weeks between her coming from the hospital and the day we went back in for an updated urinalysis and her x-rays, I feel like my dog changed completely. The princess was not the princess. She was sad, will only eat from MY hand, wants to lay in bed instead of hanging out in the main portion of the house… it was very sad to watch.

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On May 22nd, I had an appointment with our family vet. We did x-rays.

This is what we found.

Eva is three. At the time, this is three days before her third birthday, but Eva is three. She is the sweetest mushy in the world, and wants nothing more than affection and attention and to play outside and love on her kitty and her toys and just has so much life. This isn’t cancer. The family vet seems convinced that it’s a calcified muscle mass (so much muscle death occurred in three weeks… 60% of her muscle died…) but we went back to the orthopedic surgeon to decide what our range of options were. He said he obviously couldn’t be positive that it wasn’t a tumor but he just couldn’t imagine a three year old dog with a bone tumor.

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* i wanted to focus this entry on everything leading up to the day we saw the orthopedic surgeon.
everything after then kind of happened all at once
(within 24 hours of her diagnosis we had completed her amputation)
it will all be included in it’s own post *