Sweet Serena

Serena has been limping since the beginning of the last snow storm. I think she must have hurt herself the night before, actually, because she was already lame on her left(?) front leg when the first snow fell. She wanted to romp and play in it regardless, but I tried to keep her from playing with Della throughout the snow event, which of course made it less fun for Della as well.

I have had her on an anti-inflammatory for almost two weeks now and have tried to limit her activity. It has improved some, she's using it a bit more than she did in the beginning, but not a lot. 

Some folks may remember a similar incident with Serena in the winter, I think it was two years ago. She turned up lame after an ice event and I assumed that she had slid and overextended one of those long legs and hurt herself somehow. X-rays were rather vague (inconclusive) and we ended up seeing a specialist who was preparing me for a bone cancer diagnosis. The other possibility, he said, was that she simply had an infection in her shoulder joint. I certainly preferred that scenario and a course of antibiotics actually cleared up the swelling and lameness much to my relief. 

Night before last, I stepped in a puddle of pee on the floor when getting up in the middle of the night to do the same. The next day Serena pissed in her crate, soaking a dog bed, and she even passed up on a meal-- two things that Serena has never done. Calls were made resulting in a vet appointment Friday morning. 

The result of all this is that I've got a round of antibiotics for Serena, to treat what is presumably a urinary tract infection (she wouldn't give a sample when we were at the vet), and to treat what I fervently hope is a recurrence of the infection in her shoulder joint and not anything much more dire.

Serena was so nervous at the vet that she stuck to me so closely that I had a hard time getting any pics of her.

p.s. A google search turned up my posts about Serena's past incident of lameness. It was three years ago, just about this same time of year. See these posts from February 6, 2019, and February 12, 2019. She has really turned gray in the past two years!